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THE  MODERN  NOVEL 

BY   WILSON    FOLLETT 


BY  HELEN  THOMAS  FOLLETT 
and  WILSON  FOLLETT 


SOME  MODERN  NOVELISTS 


THE 
MODERN  NOVEL 

a^ — — ■ — ^^— n^—  ■■  i«  mil  mm—  I  ■  n  —mi  ■»— — —— 

A    STUDY    OF   THE    PURPOSE 
AND  THE  MEANING  OF  FICTION 


BY 

WILSON  FOLLETT 


C. 


\W 


NEW  YORK    ALFRED  A.  KNOPF    MCMXVIII 


•  .  c     J  o 


COPYRIGHT,  1918,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  Inc. 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMEBICA 


*        tit      »    *      ^ 


■ 


i(i      it. 


*  t.    ».  >  i    t  t  t  t  4  t 


PREFACE 

This  book  is  an  attempt  to  trace  the  development  of 
some  important  principles  of  fictional  criticism  dur- 
ing the  two  centuries  of  the  novel  in  English,  and 
to  show  how  the  development  of  these  principles  has 
in  turn  altered  the  shape  of  the  modern  novel.     From 
the  point  of  view  here  maintained,  criticism  is  not 
.    only    effect   but    also    cause.     Its    ideas    are    indeed 
£>   gradually  evolved  from  what  has  been  done,  and  of 
fc  course  from  what  has  been  poorly  done  or  left  undone ; 
but  they  are  with  equal  certainty  gradually  incor- 
porated into   what  is  being  done,   and  this  second 
half  of  the  process  is  none  the  less  significant  for 
aving  been  so  largely  neglected  by  the  conventional 
itic  and  historian.     Criticism  is  a  forecast  as  well 
as  a  record,  and  a  leverage  for  raising  the  standard 
as  well  as  a  standard  held  up.     This  endless  cycle 
of  interactions  is  what  I  have  studied,  in  an  effort  to 
show  how  criticism  itself  is  creative,  and  especially 
how  both  the  critical  and  the  creative  forces  of  past 
generations  come  to  focus  in  the  latest  definable  stage 
of   fiction,   that   of  the  late   19th  century ,  and  the 
early   20th.     I  have  tried  to   accomplish  that  pur- 
pose with  a  due  recognition  that  this,  or  any,  latest 
stage  is  itself  but  tentative  and  experimental.     The 
novel  as  we  have  it  is  the  past  crystallizing;  but, 

5 


382993 


PREFACE 


thanks  to  the  force  of  criticism  and  to  no  other  force 
whatsoever,  it  is  as  truly  the  future  germinating. 

If  the  function  here  ascribed  to  criticism  seem  over- 
stated, one  has  only  to  reflect  how  trifling  a  part  of  the 
whole  body  of  criticism  is  comprised  by  its  special  and 
formal  embodiments  in  reviews,  essays,  histories,  ap- 
preciations and  estimates  of  individual  authors  or 
periods,  and  books  about  books — including  such  books 
as  this.  A  novelist  more  or  less  consciously  picks  and 
chooses  among  the  past  achievements  of  the  art  he 
practises,  reassembling  them  as  the  basis  for  his  own 
superstructure.  His  doing  so  is  criticism.  Subse- 
quently, he  is  always  examining  the  materials  and 
proportions  of  his  own  structure,  to  strengthen  or 
modify  or  discard ;  and  the  process  by  which  he  does 
that  is  criticism.  He  learns  much  from  his  successes 
and  failures ;  something  from  his  readers ;  more  from 
the  successes  and  failures  of  his  contemporaries;  a 
little  perhaps  from  the  formal  appraisals  of  the  critic 
— in  short,  he  grows,  or  at  least  changes,  and  his 
growth  is  a  result  of  criticism.  "Whole  generations 
and  schools  of  novelists,  in  periods  of  international 
diffusion  such  as  the  latter  17th  century  and  the 
early  20th,  learn  from  the  fiction  and  the  criticism 
of  other  countries;  on  a  sudden,  perhaps  indeed 
too  suddenly,  their  ingrowing  provincialism  becomes 
outward-reaching  cosmopolitanism.  That  change 
means  criticism  brought  to  bear  on  a  still  grander 
scale.  And,  finally,  whatever  other  forces  fail  or 
prevail,  there  is  always  the  Zeitgeist,  the  general 
movement    and   direction    of    humane    consciousness 


PREFACE 


— a  subtle,  irresistible,  ceaseless  play  of  criticism  over 
the  whole  field  of  things  dreamed,  known,  or  done, 
compelling  all  representative  art,  in  common  with  all 
other  civilized  manifestations,  to  be  a  response  to 
needs  so  inchoate  that  they  may  never  have  got  them- 
selves expressed  or  acknowledged  save  in  their  re- 
sults, yet  so  universally  cogent  that  no  living  indi- 
vidual can  will  to  refuse  them  his  service. 

Everything,  properly  considered,  is  a  criticism  of 
everything  else.  Whenever  we  perceive  the  differ- 
ences between  one  thing  and  another,  and  then  com- 
mit ourselves  to  a  choice  in  the  light  of  some  felt  need 
for  one  thing  as  against  the  other,  we  perform  an  act 
of  criticism.  It  is  manifestly  a  danger  that  we  shall 
underrate,  rather  than  overrate,  the  momentousness 
of  the  critical  faculty  so  defined. 

This  book  is  not,  then,  primarily  a  history  of  the 
English  novel  from  Defoe  to  Hardy,  even  though  it 
includes  much  illustrative  description  of  the  princi- 
pal developments  between  1700  and  1900 ;  and  neither 
is  it  a  treatise  on  criticism  or  the  aesthetics  of  fiction 
in  vacuo.  It  is  a  statement  of  some  critical  and 
aesthetic  principles  in  terms  of  their  historical  evolu- 
tion in  and  from  the  English  novel.  I  choose  the 
English  novel  because  on  the  whole  it  developed  most 
provincially,  refusing  until  singularly  late  to  become 
a  matter  of  comparative  literature,  and  becoming  at 
length  so  suddenly  overwhelmed  with  international 
modernness  that  its  story  seems  especially  determinate 
and  dramatic.  It  should  be  added  that  I  have  not 
been  ashamed  to  include  a  great  deal  of  historical  in- 


8  PREFACE 


formation  simply  because  I  think  it  ought  to  be  fa- 
miliar to  students  of  the  novel,  or  to  make  use  of  the 
obvious  and  the  truistic  when  to  do  so  helps  the  argu- 
ment. 

It  is  a  graceless  thing  to  parade  one's  own  merits, 
but  I  really  cannot  forbear  pointing  out  my  one  small 
claim  to  the  gratitude  of  all  and  sundry.  Except  for 
a  trivial  indiscretion  committed  by  Mr.  William  Dean 
Howells  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago,  and 
reproduced  on  page  268,  you  might  search  in  vain 
through  these  ten  chapters  for  the  aimless  and  ques- 
tion-begging word  "psychology"  or  any  of  its  deri- 
vatives. 

W.  F. 


CONTENTS 

I  The  Creative  Impulse  11 

II  Romance  43 

III  Sentimentalism  71 

IV  Didacticism  101 
V  Satire  131 

VI    The  Realistic  Spirit  155 
VII    Tragedy  and  Comedy  181 
VIII    Humanism  207 
IX    Design  235 
X    "Entertainment"  263 
Bibliography  287 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE 


This  series  of  discussions  about  the  purpose  and 
the  meaning  of  fiction  does  not  aspire  to  be  anything 
half  so  fundamental  or  half  so  presumptuous  as  a 
metaphysical  justification  of  the  novel.  The  meta- 
physical justification  of  anything — including  both  fic- 
tion, which  is  a  "criticism  of  life,"  and  life  itself — 
rests  on  premises  dictated  by  the  philosophy  one  hap- 
pens to  believe  in.  To  the  pessimist,  nothing  justifies 
its  existence,  not  even  his  own  despair;  to  the  opti- 
mist, all  things  work  together  for  good,  even  the 
things  that  seem,  when  taken  by  themselves  and  mo- 
mentarily, worst.  The  cynic  sage  who  wrote,  in  a 
burst  of  fretful  impatience,  "Of  making  books  there 
is  no  end,"  would  have  found  nothing  to  solace  him 
in  this  age  when,  it  is  said,  everybody  who  is  not  writ- 
ing novels  is  reading  them,  and  when  (it  may  be 
added)  every  one  is  talking  about  them,  even  the  per- 
sons who  neither  read  nor  write  them.  The  optimist, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  not  only  not  put  out  of  coun- 
tenance by  the  making  and  selling  of  many  very  bad 
books,  but  he  can  even  face  without  chagrin  the  sad 
modern  industry  of  reviewing  them. 

Now  it  is  not  the  function  of  the  critic  to  dictate 
to  his  audience  the  philosophical  opinions  they  should 
hold;  they  would  not  listen  to  him  anyway,  for  we 

13 


14  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

choose  our  philosophies,  as  we  do  our  occupations  or 
our  neckties,  by  temperamental  bias.  Theologies  go 
as  much  by  favour  as  kisses  do.  Any  discussion  has 
to  begin  therefore  with  immense  assumptions, — that 
is,  if  it  insist  on  getting  somewhere, — and  even  what 
we  call  "first  principles"  take  unspeakable  things  for 
granted.  What  we  must  take  for  granted  here  is  a 
certain  resigned  and  unflinching  state  of  the  con- 
science, an  objective  and  impartially  inquiring  condi- 
tion to  which  most  humane  intelligences  come  sooner 
or  later,  in  which  all  the  works  of  both  nature  and 
man  seem  worth  an  expenditure  of  interest  or  of 
curiosity — among  them  not  least  the  fine  art  of  telling 
stories. 

It  is  far  from  my  thought  to  say  that  whatever  is  is 
right, — the  philosophy  of  a  shallow  opportunist  with- 
out responsibility, — or  that  a  thing  is  good  simply 
because  it  exists  in  great  quantity,  as  anything  must 
to  be  popularly  accredited.  But  one  can  say  that 
there  is  a  very  important  sense  in  which  whatever  ex- 
ists is  worth  considering,  even  if  the  consideration 
amount  only  to  a  casual  passing  glance.  The  uni- 
versality of  our  interest  in  fiction  does  not  prove  that 
fiction  has  any  inherent  right  to  the  space  it  occupies 
in  our  libraries  or  in  our  lives ;  but  it  does  prove  that 
we  have  given  fiction  a  sort  of  pragmatic  claim  on  us 
by  giving  so  much  of  ourselves  to  it.  In  short,  books, 
and  more  especially  novels,  are  worth  writing  and 
buying  and  reading  and  criticizing  in  just  about  the 
measure  of  our  finding  them  so.  Work  of  the  hand, 
work  of  the  brain — it  is  all  subject  to  the  same  law; 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       15 

this  law  which,  where  it  touches  the  study  of  the 
classics,  also  a  pursuit  resting  on  vast  assumptions,  we 
tritely  embody  in  an  admonition  to  young  men  who 
are  supposed  not  to  enjoy  their  work:  "You'll  get 
out  of  it  exactly  what  you  put  into  it."  Things 
mean  what  we  find  in  them  or  bring  out  of  them  for 
ourselves,  by  imagination,  insight,  the  will  to  be  in- 
terested; books  are  worth  whatever  we  make  them 
worth  in  terms  of  our  own  curiosity  or  wonder  or 
inspiration — the  impersonal  virtues  of  the  mind. 

Such  then  is  the  initial  postulate,  and  the  only  jus- 
tification of  the  novel  that  need  be  attempted  here. 
The  study  of  fiction  is  a  pleasurable  task  whose  value 
is  to  be  measured,  not  in  abstractions,  not  in  any  re- 
mote philosophical  or  aesthetic  categories,  but  em- 
pirically and  pragmatically,  in  terms  of  its  effect  on 
our  own  emotions  and  wills.  The  question  is  not, 
What  must  be  our  attitude  toward  the  art  of  fiction? 
It  is  rather,  What  must  fiction  have  done  to  us  be- 
fore it  becomes  deserving  of  consideration  as  an  art? 
Fiction  is  a  creative  art  in  that  it  creates  something 
in  its  audience.  Therein  it  is  like  friendship.  He 
who  makes  a  friend,  as  Mr.  Chesterton  says,  makes 
a  man.  The  novelist  and  his  reader  create  and  per- 
petuate each  other,  by  a  uniquely  impersonal  reci- 
procity. The  ideal  responsibility  of  fiction  is  to 
make  us  dream  nobly  and  disinterestedly,  to  give  a 
beautiful  and  intelligible  shape  to  the  best  of  our 
desire.  If  it  do  that,  it  justifies  itself  in  and  through 
us.  Meanwhile  it  is  for  criticism  to  say  whether  the 
dreaming  is  noble  and  disinterested,  the  shape  of  it  a 


16  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

beautiful  and  intelligible  one;  to  make  sure  that  our 
bread  is  not  a  stone — or,  as  Professor  Saintsbury  says 
in  a  slightly  different  connection,  pie-crust. 

And  so  we  begin  a  stage  farther  along  than  the 
question  whether  the  intrinsic  claim  of  the  novel  is 
such  that  we  ought  to  concede  anything  to  it ;  farther 
along,  where  we  meet  these  two  other  questions,  What 
are  the  claims  of  the  novel?  and  What  is  or  may  be 
the  nature  of  the  concession  we  do  make? 


II 


There  is,  it  will  appear  from  the  form  of  these 
questions,  a  reason  for  the  apparent  repetition  in  a 
general  title  such  as  "The  Purpose  and  the  Meaning 
of  Fiction. ' '  The  purpose  of  fiction  is  one  thing :  the 
meaning  of  fiction  is,  or  may  be,  quite  another.  We 
can  see  and  admit  forthwith,  as  an  axiom  of  good 
sense,  that  high  merit  in  fiction  is  likely  to  have  some- 
thing to  do  with  the  incidence  of  purpose  and  mean- 
ing; the  best  novel,  other  things  being  equal,  is  that 
in  which  the  effect  sensed  by  the  reader  is  most  like 
that  intended  by  the  author,  and  the  poorest  novel, 
other  things  remaining  equal,  is  that  in  which  the  ef- 
fect sensed  is  least  like  that  intended.  One  does,  to 
be  sure,  hear  music  discussed  by  seemingly  intelligent 
persons  who  profess  to  believe  that  the  composer 
merely  surrenders  himself  to  inexplicable  impulses  and 
emotions,  creating  he  knows  not  what,  and  caring  not 
at  all  whether  his  impulses  and  emotions  are  repro- 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       17 


duced  in  the  listener,  so  long  as  some  sufficiently  in- 
tense effects  are  produced.  To  any  one  who  traces  in 
music  primarily  its  design  or  pattern — or,  let  us  say, 
to  whom  music  is  unintelligible  without  its  pattern — 
this  is  an  abhorrent  theory  of  inspiration.  Still, 
many  persons  do  hold  it;  and  perhaps  it  may  be  ex- 
tended without  flagrant  irrationality  to  lyric  poetry, 
and  even  to  some  kinds  of  plastic  representation.  But 
hardly  to  imaginative  literature  as  we  have  known  it 
in  prose.  We  dispute  now  and  again  about  what 
Shakspere  meant  by  certain  parts  of  Hamlet;  but 
no  one  doubts  that  he  meant  something,  that  he  was 
deliberately  trying  to  communicate  the  same  meaning 
to  us  all,  and  that  either  the  play  or  the  audience 
relatively  fails  whenever  the  audience  misses  com- 
munity of  impression.  In  this  discussion  of  the  re- 
lation between  purveyor  and  public,  it  makes  little 
difference  which  fails :  the  point  is  all  in  the  success  or 
failure  of  the  relation.  There  is  no  consummation  of 
art  except  in  the  audience. 

It  is  quite  true  that,  in  some  rare  instances,  the 
artist  may  profit  by  an  effect  not  in  his  intention; 
may  actually,  without  knowing  it,  build  better  than 
his  design.  Every  reader  of  Fielding  will  remember 
two  gentlemen,  or  rather  two  animated  and  diverting 
caricatures,  by  name  Thwackum  and  Square,  who  had 
charge  of  the  upbringing  of  Tom  Jones.  Mr.  Square 
the  philosopher  is  always  talking  about  "the  natural 
beauty  of  virtue";  to  Mr.  Thwackum  the  clergyman 
there  is  no  power  except  "the  divine  power  of  grace." 
Probably  Fielding  intended  to  represent,  in  these  two 


18  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

quaint  ethical  theorists,  simply  two  characteristic 
18th  century  notions  which  he  hated  and  wished 
to  hold  up  to  ridicule:  the  notion  that  thinking 
straight  is  the  way  of  salvation  however  crooked  one's 
conduct,  and  the  notion  that  straight  conduct  is 
worthless  unless  it  is  inspired  by  a  prescribed  way 
of  thinking — in  this  instance  the  creed  of  the  Church 
of  England.  Both  figures  are  incomplete  as  men ; 
they  remain  simply  walking  embodiments  of  their 
respective  narrow  doctrines,  in  spite  of  Fielding's  evi- 
dent desire  to  give  them  human  nature  and  make 
them  humanly  live.  It  takes  a  more  modern  detach- 
ment than  Fielding  ever  knew  to  see  the  fitness  of 
his  failure.  There  is  an  almost  symbolic  appropriate- 
ness in  the  hollow  unreality  of  Messrs.  Thwackum  and 
Square:  how  could  such  ideas,  so  held,  produce  actual 
human  beings?  The  limitations  of  these  two  as  men 
prove,  as  no  amount  of  calculated  satire  could,  the 
limitations  of  their  doctrines.  It  takes  the  capacity 
for  spontaneous  warm-hearted  action,  plus  the  sense 
of  legitimate  impersonal  law  imposed  from  without,  to 
make  the  rounded  man ;  to  be  complete  and  real  is  to 
adjust  the  natural  inward  impulses  to  the  artificial 
codes  by  which  we  must  needs  partly  live.  How  fit- 
ting, then,  that  it  should  take  Thwackum  and  Square 
together  to  come  somewhere  near  making  up  one  aver- 
age piece  of  human  nature  !  Here  is  an  instance  which 
shows  the  artist  gaining  something  through  his  failure 
to  carry  out  his  intention :  if  the  characters  were  com- 
plete as  men,  they  would  be  pointless  and  inconsistent 
as  doctrinaires.    And  I  have  sometimes  thought  that 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       19 

so  great  an  artist  as  Jane  Austen  gains  as  a  social 
comedist  by  revealing  in  the  world  of  her  persons  a 
moral  poverty  and  narrowness  which  she  hardly  saw 
there  herself. 

Such  examples  are,  however,  not  frequent.  In  gen- 
eral the  novelist  loses  by  missing  his  design.  Jane 
Eyre  is  weakened,  however  far  from  crucially,  be- 
cause Rochester,  who  was  intended  for  a  gentleman,  is 
so  obviously  a  cad.  The  history  of  fiction  is  full  of 
writers  who  lost  much  through  the  illusion  that  they 
could  portray  types  they  did  not  know  and  manage 
scenes  they  had  never  caught  the  spirit  of. 

We  want  fiction,  then,  to  understand  what  it  is 
about  and  plan  the  effect  which  it  can  produce.  But 
this  is  not  to  say  that  the  plan  and  the  effect  are  the 
same  thing.  The  given  effect  may  follow  from  the 
given  cause,  but  cause  is  still  one  thing  and  effect  an- 
other. In  considering  fiction,  it  happens  to  be  of 
singular  importance  to  keep  this  disjunction  in  mind, 
to  the  end  that  we  may  understand  something  of  the 
all-important  relation  between  subjective  and  objec- 
tive. That  is  why  I  have  made  the  first  group  of 
these  discussions  deal  with  fiction  as  I  suppose  it  to  be 
conceived  and  written,  the  second  group  with  fiction  as 
it  is  read  and  understood.  I  want  to  analyse  first,  as 
well  as  I  can,  what  writers  put  into  their  stories  and. 
the  processes  by  which  they  put  it  in ;  and  then,  what 
readers  get  out  of  those  stories  and  the  re-creative 
processes  by  which  they  get  it  out. 

And  naturally  I  begin  with  the  mainspring  of  all 
poetic  effort,  the  initial  creative  impulse,  asking  some 


20  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

very  plain  and  elemental  questions:  What  is  the 
force  which  urges  the  story-teller  to  take  up  the  pen 
and  drive  it  forward?  Whence  comes  that  special 
desire  of  his  to  tell  a  story  for  the  delight  or  the  profit 
of  those  whom  he  has  never  seen,  and  what  is  the 
nature  of  that  desire?  It  will  be  understood  that 
there  is  here  no  speaking  officially  or  pro  domo,  no 
claim  of  special  divination:  we  proceed  by  deduction 
and  inference,  trying  if  we  can  to  descry  the  intention 
in  the  performance,  as  Mr.  Kipling's  Builder,  com- 
ing on  the  ruined  work  of  a  predecessor,  reads 

"The  form  of  the  dream  he  had  followed  in  the  face  of  the 
thing  he  had  planned." 


Ill 


I  have  spoken  of  fiction  as  having  something  to  do 
with  dreaming:  let  me  distinguish  it  at  once  from 
that  idle  and  irresponsible  day-dreaming  in  which,  at 
odd  times,  we  all  lose  ourselves  with  a  certain  vision- 
ary of  modern  fiction,  "forgetting  the  bitterness  of  toil 
and  strife  in  the  vision  of  a  great  and  splendid  re- 
ward. ' ' x  We  all  lie  awake  at  night  and  plan  for 
ourselves  impossible  golden  futures  in  which  we  are 
the  impossible  heroes  and  heroines,  achieving  the 
prodigious  with  hardly  the  effort  which  in  real  life 
we  must  give  to  the  commonplace,  getting  our  ene- 

i  Almayer,  in  Almayer's  Folly.  By  Joseph  Conrad.  New 
York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co, 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       21 

mies  humbled  and  our  supreme  deserts  acknowledged 
and  rewarded,  and  having  our  own  way  generally. 
There  is  a  superstition  abroad  that  the  genetic  im- 
pulse of  fiction  is  like  this,  and  fiction  itself  the 
writer's  dream,  his  escape  from  burdensome  actuali- 
ties. And  certainly  many  readers  take  their  fiction 
as  an  escape,  a  drug  or  anodyne — a  kind  of  vicarious 
day-dreaming. 

Not  so,  I  believe,  the  artist.  The  only  day-dreams 
really  worth  while  are  those  in  which  we  lose  our- 
selves, transcending  reality  as  on  wings,  breathing 
upper  airs  of  impossible  rarity;  but  the  only  novels 
really  worth  while  are  those  in  which  the  novelist 
never  for  an  instant  loses  his  complete  sense  of  self- 
possession,  the  perfect  awareness  of  what  he  is  about. 
His  dreaming  is  purposed  and  controlled ;  it  differs  in 
a  dozen  sharp  and  unequivocal  ways  from  the  purely 
subjective  dreams  through  which  the  best  of  us  at 
times  let  ourselves  beautifully  drift.  Our  dreams  are 
exceptional  and  lawless,  we  conjure  up  delights  that 
never  were  on  land  or  sea;  the  novelist's  dream  is 
typical  and  regulated.  Our  dreams  are  very  likely  to 
be  patched  copies  of  other  dreams  heard  or  read,  as 
every  cheap  popular  song  is  a  mosaic  of  all  other 
cheap  popular  songs;  whereas  the  novelist's  dream 
must  be,  in  its  central  nature,  an  original  thing,  or  it 
would  better  not  be  at  all.  What  we  distort,  he  re- 
duces to  shape  and  balance ;  what  we  leave  to  its  own 
unobstructed  play  on  our  charitable  credulity,  he 
cannot  leave  until  it  is  presentable  to  the  uncharitable 
incredulity  of  mankind  in  general.     Our  day-dream  is 


22  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

a  result  of  inhibitions  broken  down  and  swept  away : 
we  let  ourselves  go.  The  novelist,  however  like  his 
creative  instinct  may  be  to  ours,  cannot  do  that;  half 
the  worth  of  his  dream  is  in  the  checks  and  inhibi- 
tions which  govern  the  unfolding  of  it. 

All  these  differences  reduce  themselves  on  inspec- 
tion to  a  single  inclusive  difference:  we  dream  day- 
dreams for  pure  self -delight,  using  the  gift  of  fancy 
to  glut  ourselves;  whereas  the  novelist  writes  stories 
in  order  to  give  himself,  for  the  delight  of  readers 
whom  he  has  never  seen  and  cannot  know.  The  con- 
ditions of  his  work  are  determined  by  the  fact  that 
it  is  work  and  not  play;  by  the  fact  that  he  has  an 
audience  with  a  receptivity  subservient  to  a  set  of 
laws  which  he  must  master ;  a  set  of  exceedingly  subtle 
and  elusive  laws  whose  working  is  of  a  nicety  almost 
past  finding  out.  The  one  faculty  upon  which  he 
cannot  play  at  will  is  that  self-love  which  is  in  every 
one  of  us,  and  which  is  alone  sufficient  to  give  our 
day-dreams  the  temporary  illusion  of  reality.  We 
can  believe  in  anything  so  long  as  it  is  ours,  part  of 
us.  But  the  novelist  asks  us  to  enter  into  something 
which  is  not  ours  at  all,  something  to  which  our  self- 
interest  can  give  no  hue  of  reality,  since  no  self-inter- 
est is  at  hazard.  The  artist  is  always  trying  to  ap- 
peal to  an  attention  outside  and  other  than  his  own. 
Without  this  will  to  appeal  there  is  no  art. 

It  is  some  such  set  of  considerations  which  we  forget 
when  we  define  art  as  "self -expression" — an  unintel- 
ligible definition,  confusing  as  it  does  this  ordered  and 
self-possessed  visioning   of  the   artist   with   the   un- 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       23 


bridled  self -gratification  of  our  most  selfish  moments. 
Of  course  we  express  ourselves  in  whatever  we  do ;  all 
activity  is  self-expression,  so  that  the  term  really  de- 
fines nothing  because  it  covers  everything.  Walking 
is  self-expression,  if  you  like,  and  the  gait  an  index 
of  character.  So  is  lying:  it  is  possible  that  we  are 
never  more  truly  ourselves  than  when  we  think  we 
are  concealing  ourselves.  But  we  walk  to  get  some- 
where; we  lie  to  accomplish  something.  A  novel  too 
is  a  measure  of  its  writer ;  but  he  writes  it  in  order  to 
get  something  communicated.  He  cannot  help  ex- 
pressing himself :  a  man  under  an  anaesthetic,  or  inco- 
herently drunk,  or  suffocating  in  thick  smoke  where 
he  must  shout  for  help,  does  that.  But  the  whole 
crux  of  the  novelist's  difficulty  is  to  get  himself 
communicated;  and  it  is  a  sentimental  mistake  of 
some  popular  theorists  to  suppose  that  he  can  do  that 
by  pure  ''inspiration,"  or  pure  self-communion  apart 
from  his  audience  in  the  penetralia  of  his  own  con- 
sciousness. The  lyric  poet  may  sometimes,  not  other- 
wise than  by  happiest  accident,  speak  to  us  intelligibly 
from  those  hidden  recesses.  Not  so  the  novelist.  He 
deals  with  a  truth  which  cannot  be  breathed  out  of 
himself:  he  must  seek  it  through  the  world  with  pain 
and  effort,  win  it  for  his  own  by  living  it — 

"For  truth  needs  doing;  beauty  seems 
A  dream  till  we  awake  from  dreams" — 

and  shape  and  re-clothe  it,  not  for  himself,  but  for  us. 

He  will  do  well  to  remember,  if  the  struggle  for  bare 

existence  has  not  already  made  it  impossible  to  forget, 


24  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


Stevenson's  comparison  of  the  artist  to  the  fille  de 
joie,  the  obscure  and  draggled  woman  of  the  streets; 
for  he  too  is  taking  pay  for  his  laughter,  his  com- 
panionship, the  gift  of  himself,  nor  can  anything  hide 
or  change  the  elemental  fact  which  is  the  material 
excuse  for  his  trade — the  fact  that  he  lives  by  it. 
"An  author,"  says  Fielding  at  the  beginning  of  Tom 
Jones,  "ought  to  consider  himself,  not  as  a  gentleman 
who  gives  a  private  or  eleemosynary  treat,  but  rather 
as  one  who  keeps  a  public  ordinary,  at  which  all  per- 
sons are  welcome  for  their  money.  .  .  .  Men  who  pay 
for  what  they  eat  will  insist  on  gratifying  their  pal- 
ates, however  nice  and  whimsical  these  may  prove; 
and  if  everything  is  not  agreeable  to  their  taste,  will 
challenge  a  right  to  censure,  to  abuse,  and  to  damn 
their  dinner  without  control."  The  best  instincts 
in  us  may  lament  the  fact:  Mr.  Howells  says,  in 
writing  of  "The  Man  of  Letters  as  a  Man  of  Busi- 
ness, " x  "I  do  not  think  any  man  ought  to  live  by 
an  art.  .  .  .  There  is  an  instinctive  sense  of  this,  even 
in  the  midst  of  the  grotesque  confusion  of  our  eco- 
nomic being;  people  feel  that  there  is  something  pro- 
fane, something  impious,  in  taking  money  for  a  pic- 
ture, or  a  poem,  or  a  statue.  .  .  .  The  instinctive 
sense  of  the  dishonour  which  money-purchase  does  to 
art  is  so  strong  that  sometimes  a  man  of  letters  who 
can  pay  his  way  otherwise  refuses  pay  for  his  work, 
as  Lord  Byron  did,  for  a  while,  from  a  noble  pride, 
and  as  Count  Tolstoy  has  tried  to  do,  from  a  noble 

i  In  Literature  and  Life.     By  William  Dean  Howells.     New 
York:   Harper  &  Bros. 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       25 

conscience."  But  even  such  personal  independence 
only  shifts  the  evil:  "Byron's  publisher  profited  by 
a  generosity  which  did  not  reach  his  readers ;  and  the 
Countess  Tolstoy  collects  the  copyright  which  her 
husband  foregoes  [this  was  published  in  1902]  ;  so 
that  these  two  eminent  instances  of  protest  against 
business  in  literature  may  be  said  not  to  have  shaken 
its  money  basis. ' '  And  even  if  writer,  publisher,  and 
public  could  all  completely  escape  buying  and  selling, 
the  writer  would  still  have  no  hold  upon  his  public  ex- 
cept by  pleasing  it.  His  appeal  as  an  artist  is  de- 
pendent on  the  arbitrary  taste  of  a  multitude,  even  if 
his  living  cease  to  be — so  that  if  he  can  make  up  his 
mind  to  the  greater  limitation,  it  is  hardly  worth  his 
while  to  boggle  at  the  lesser. 

We  need  no  Fielding,  no  Stevenson,  no  Howells 
come  to  tell  us  such  things :  they  are  matters  of  plain- 
est hardest  common  sense.  But  they  are  too  often 
forgotten.  The  argument  has  sometimes  been  used  to 
justify  giving  the  buying  and  reading  public  the  poor- 
est thing  it  can  be  brought  to  accept,  instead  of  the 
best  thing  it,  perhaps  unconsciously,  wants;  but  al- 
most any  argument  can  be  prostituted  to  a  low  ex- 
pediency. We  say  that  the  artist  must  serve,  if  he 
is  to  discharge  his  office  at  all :  this  is  not  to  say  that  he 
ought  to  pander.  If  he  choose  to  pander,  we  should 
let  him ;  our  safeguard  against  him  is  the  public  right 
to  find  him  out  in  the  long  run  and  have  no  more  of 
him:  it  is  not  in  the  destruction  of  his  right  to  be 
what  he  chooses.  But  in  either  event,  whether  he 
panders  or  truly  serves,  he  has  fully  as  much  to  gain 


26  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

through  self-suppression  as  through  self-expression. 
He  must  be  true  to  himself;  but  that  fidelity  will  avail 
him  nothing  unless  he  is  also  true  to  his  audience,  to 
his  subject,  and  to  the  obscure  principles  of  his  appeal 
to  thousands  of  intelligences  as  unlike  his  own  as  they 
are  unlike  each  other. 

Let  us  see,  if  we  can,  what  some  of  the  chief  of 
these  principles  are,  and  how  they  operate;  what 
kinds  of  provision  the  novelist  must  make  for  his 
audience  that  the  mere  dreamer  of  dreams  takes  no 
thought  of. 

IV 

One  thinks  pretty  readily  of  four  special  ways  in 
which  the  novelist  must  take  thought  and  thoroughly 
know  what  he  is  about ;  four  provisions  which  he  must 
thoroughly  accomplish  if  his  work  is  completely  to 
justify  itself  in  our  eyes.  They  are,  to  name  them 
only:  (1)  Realism  of  Circumstance;  (2)  Truth  by 
Representation;  (3)  Freshness  or  Originality;  and 
(4)  Fusion  of  these  three  and  of  all  the  other  ele- 
ments that  enter  into  his  subject.  Realism,  Repre- 
sentation, Originality,  and  Fusion.  Let  us  see  what 
ought  to  be  meant  by  these  labels. 

The  first,  Realism  of  Circumstance,  explains  itself. 
Of  the  realistic  spirit  I  shall  have,  later  on,  much 
more  to  say:  I  speak  here,  not  of  a  spirit,  but  of  a 
process.  It  is  obvious  enough  that  the  sound  master 
of  fiction,  knowing  that  he  can  successfully  impart  no 
dream  of  his  through   credulity  based  on  self-love, 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE        27 

must  take  infinite  precaution  that  it  shall  seem  true; 
and  that  the  more  romantic  it  is  in  essence  the  more 
realistic  he  must  make  it  in  detail.  There  is  no  bet- 
ter exemplification  of  this  truism  than  that  Daniel 
Defoe- — a  master,  Professor  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  calls 
him,  of  "grave  imperturbable  lying" — who  wrote  a 
lengthy  account  of  the  London  plague  of  1665  with 
such  vividness  that  many  unlearned  readers  still  ac- 
cept it  as  the  account  of  an  eye-witness,  though  Defoe 
was  but  four  years  old  in  the  Plague  Year;  who  con- 
trived a  recital  of  a  certain  great  November  storm 
from  hearsay  and  imagination,  recounting  casualties 
by  land  and  sea,  and  including  wholly  fictitious  letters 
from  eye-witnesses  who  never  existed ;  who  gave  many 
preposterous  events  in  all  parts  of  the  world  the 
immediacy  and  the  ring  of  truth,  simply  by  giving 
them  a  latitude  and  a  longitude ;  and  who,  as  the  sum- 
mit of  his  achievement,  took  the  most  utterly  romantic 
figure  of  all,  the  lonely  hermit  of  Juan  Fernandez, 
and  made  him  easily  the  most  real  of  all,  by  diary,  by 
dialogue,  by  inventory,  by  all  the  little  fine  arts  of 
persuasion.  "There  never  was  such  a  man  or  such 
an  island,"  you  say  (it  makes  no  difference  that, 
historically  speaking,  there  was)  ;  "there  never  was 
a  Crusoe,  or  a  hut  with  a  hedge  of  stakes  round  it, 
or  a  boat  hollowed  labouriously  out  of  a  tree  and  then 
found  to  be  immovably  heavy."  To  which  credulity 
answers:  "Ah,  but  you  forget:  all  these  things  were, 
because  a  man  wrote  a  diary  about  them!  They 
might,  in  an  ordinary  sea-tale,  seem  rather  a  large 
order ;  but — why,  we  have  the  man 's  own  diary  ! ' ' 


28  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

And  there  is  an  image  of  what  the  artist's  quest 
for  actuality  must  be,  in  a  certain  "scowered"  silk 
dress  worn  by  a  lady  some  twenty-four  hours  dead, 
and  used  by  Defoe  to  help  sell  a  seventh-rate  and  un- 
salable clerical  work,  Drelincourt 's  Book  of  Consola- 
tions Against  the  Fears  of  Death,  with  which  the  Lon- 
don book  trade  appears  to  have  been  overstocked  in 
1705.  The  estimable  Mrs.  Bargrave,  living  at  Can- 
terbury, receives  one  morning  a  call  from  her  old 
friend  and  neighbour  Mrs.  Veal,  whom  she  has  not 
seen  for  a  long  time,  and  who  announces  now  that  she 
has  come  to  say  good-bye  before  taking  a  journey. 
The  two  gossip  together  in  a  most  natural  and  familiar 
vein,  about  head-aches,  and  husbands,  and  friend- 
ship, and  the  degeneracy  of  the  times,  and  other  re- 
liable subjects,  taking  pains  to  allude  several  times 
to  the  great  comfort  and  inspiration  they  have  re- 
ceived from  that  incomparable  work,  the  Book  of 
Consolations.  All  is  most  natural;  the  talk  proceeds 
like  a  stenographic  report  of  things  actually  said  by 
two  such  middle-class,  prosy,  and  sentimental  per- 
sons. "  'Do  not  you  think  I  am  mightily  impaired 
by  my  fits?'"  asks  Mrs.  Veal.  "  'No,'  says  Mrs. 
Bargrave,  'I  think  you  look  as  well  as  ever  I  knew 
you.'  "  And  again:  "Says  Mrs.  Bargrave:  'It  is 
hard  indeed  to  find  a  true  friend  in  these  days.' 
Says  Mrs.  Veal,  'Mr.  Norris  has  a  fine  copy  of  verses, 
called  Friendship  in  Perfection,  which  I  wonderfully 
admire.  Have  you  seen  the  book?'  'No,'  says  Mrs. 
Bargrave,  'but  I  have  the  verses  of  my  own  writing 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       29 

out.'  'Have  you?'  says  Mrs.  Veal,  'then  fetch  them.' 
Which  she  did  from  above-stairs,  and  offered  them  to 
Mrs.  Veal  to  read,  who  refused,  and  waived  the  thing, 
saying,  holding  down  her  head  would  make  it  ache ; 
and  then  desiring  Mrs.  Bargrave  to  read  them  to  her, 
which  she  did.  ...  In  these  verses  there  is  twice 
used  the  word  'Elysian.'  'Ah!'  says  Mrs.  Veal, 
'these  poets  have  such  names  for  heaven.'  "  In 
short,  the  whole  tale  is  inimitably  and  incontestably 
true,  up  to  the  point  where  it  transpires  that  at  the 
time  of  this  conversation  Mrs.  Veal  was  also  incon- 
testably dead.  Everything  in  the  story  is  true  except 
the  whole  of  it.  And  mark  how  difficult  Defoe  makes 
it  to  question  even  that  whole.  The  tale  is  told  by 
a  third  woman  of  exactly  the  same  stamp  as  the  other 
two,  a  life-long  friend  of  Mrs.  Bargrave,  ready  to 
heap  scorn  on  the  husband  and  neighbours  of  Mrs. 
Veal,  who  deny  the  story  and  impeach  the  character 
of  Mrs.  Bargrave.  Why,  Mrs.  Bargrave  is  "of  a 
cheerful  disposition,  notwithstanding  the  ill-usage  of 
a  very  wicked  husband";  of  course,  then,  the  story 
is  true.  Besides,  this  third  woman's  story  has  been 
taken  down  by  a  lawyer,  who  believes  it  himself; 
clearly,  then,  it  must  be  true!  Moreover,  Mrs.  Bar- 
grave  had  described  in  considerable  detail  the 
"scowered"  silk  dress  which  Mrs.  Veal  actually 
wore  on  the  day  of  her  death,  the  day  of  the  alleged 
visit,  though  Mrs.  Bargrave  had  never  seen  that  dress 
or  known  of  its  existence:  what  do  you  say  to  that? 
0  well,  if  Mrs.  Bargrave  really  described  the  dress, 


30  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

there 's  nothing  more  to  be  said ;  the  story  is  true, 
and  the  Book  of  Consolations  is  a  fine  book,  and  let's 
all  go  and  see  if  there  is  a  copy  to  be  had. 

Observe,  incidentally,  the  advertising  logic  of  the 
appeal:  Drelincourt  must  be  a  book  to  buy,  because 
a  ghost  said  so.  We  shall  not  be  far  amiss  if  we 
think  of  Defoe  as  having  been,  among  other  things 
variously  important,  the  father  of  modern  advertis- 
ing. What  it  is  most  desirable  to  point  out  here  is 
that  he  mastered  to  perfection  the  art  of  making  a 
little  extraneous  and  unimportant  fact  go  as  far  as 
possible  toward  establishing  his  central  fiction.  The 
more  outrageous  his  fundamental  demand  on  the 
credulity,  the  more  care  must  he  take  to  weave  that 
demand  out  of  a  tissue  of  the  commonplace,  the  daily 
homespun  actual.  And  so  it  is  ever  with  the  worker 
in  fiction.  He  must  do  for  a  high  impersonal  end 
what  Defoe  did,  on  more  than  one  occasion,  to  serve 
a  rather  low  commercial  or  political  expediency. 


This  first  kind  of  care,  for  Realism  of  Circumstance, 
makes  a  target  of  the  credulity ;  its  purpose  is  to  make 
one  see  and,  through  seeing,  believe.  Fiction  has 
been  much  likened,  of  late,  to  journalism ;  but  in  this 
respect  at  least  it  differs  from  journalism.  We  have 
a  presumption  in  favour  of  the  truth  of  what  the 
newspaper  reporter  tells  us;  at  least  we  do  unless 
we  make  a  serious  matter  of  the  trite  popular  joke 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE        31 

about  reporters.  But  our  presumption  is  all  against 
the  truth  of  what  the  novelist  tells  us.  Of  the  two, 
it  is  he  who  must  take  pains  to  make  his  story  seem 
true;  and  when  he  makes  it  seem  truer  than  truth, 
we  believe  him. 

But  his  truth  to  fact,  though  one  of  the  conditions 
of  his  usefulness,  is  far  from  being  his  prime  value. 
Fiction  begins  to  accomplish  its  real  purpose  when  it 
attains  what  I  have  called  Truth  by  Representation. 
It  must  first  make  us  believe ;  it  must  then  evoke  from 
us  a  response  to  that  which  we  have  accepted  as  truth. 
And  it  does  this  through  implied  reference  to  larger 
realities  than  are  explicitly  presented;  such  realities 
as  the  common  truths  of  all  life,  the  mysteries  of 
birth  and  death,  the  invincible  ambitions  and  terrors 
of  the  mind,  the  moral  law,  the  general  nature  of 
things.  Fiction  must  have  its  facts ;  but  it  must  also 
have  its  "meaning  of  things  beyond  the  facts."  For 
it  is  in  the  linking  of  subordinate  trivial  details  and 
episodes  with  the  trend  of  a  whole  individual  life, 
and  in  the  linking  of  the  individual  life  with  the  whole 
collective  mass  of  human  lives,  that  the  novel  wins 
its  place  as  a  "criticism  of  life." 

I  can  think  of  no  better  example  of  a  story  that 
has  this  kind  of  reference  in  large  and  satisfying 
measure  than  one  very  familiar  story  notably  lack- 
ing in  our  lesser  and  lower  kind  of  realism:  Dr. 
Johnson's  wholly  pleasing  and  still  strangely  beauti- 
ful story  of  Rasselas,  Prince  of  Abyssinia.  I  am 
aware  that  a  good  many  critics  have  described  Ras- 
selas as  a  romantic  expression  of  pessimism,  and  also 


32  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


that  Professor  William  Lyon  Phelps  has  lately  taken 
the  trouble  to  pronounce  a  curt  little  requiescat 1 
over  what  he  considers  a  corpse  past  resuscitating. 
But  how  can  Rasselas  be,  or  become,  a  dead  story 
when  it  contains  so  much  wisdom  about  life,  garbed 
in  so  beautiful  a  vesture  of  imagery  and  symbolism? 
And  how  can  it  be  called  a  pessimistic  story,'  when  it 
contains,  not  a  philosophical  interpretation  of  a  fact, 
but  the  bare  and  simple  fact  alone?  "The  Vanity  of 
Human  Wishes" — that  is  the  theme  of  Rasselas,  the 
large  general  fact  about  life  which  it  represents. 
Well,  human  wishes  are  vain,  aren't  they?  which  is 
all  that  Dr.  Johnson  says.  He  bases  his  tale  on  the 
fact,  hardly  open  to  dispute,  that  whatever  we  get 
out  of  life  we  do  not  get  what  we  are  looking  for. 
He  does  not  say  that  we  ought  to  get  what  we  are 
looking  for;  he  does  not  say,  as  a  pessimist  would, 
that  our  failure  to  get  it  proves  the  evil  organization 
of  the  world.  Johnson  draws  his  indictment,  not 
against  the  sorry  scheme  of  things  which  cheats  hu- 
man nature  out  of  its  fond  hopes,  but  against  the 
sorry  scheme  of  human  nature  itself,  which  hopes 
unreasonably,  vaunts  itself,  overestimates  its  own  de- 
serts, and  claims  more  than  it  is  in  the  nature  of 
things  to  grant.  Rasselas  is  a  plea  for  classical  or 
stoic  discipline  of  the  will.    At  the  best,  it  says, 

"Man  has  but  little  here  below, 
Nor  has  that  little  long": 

then  it  is  the  part  of  wisdom  for  him  to  curb  his  ex- 

i  Tn  The  Advance  of  the  English  Novel.     By  William  Lyon 
Phelps.     New  York:   Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       33 

pectations,  make  the  most  of  his  little,  and  turn  from 
following  illusive  phantoms  of  happiness  and  free- 
dom which  the  collective  wisdom  of  mankind  has 
never  been  able  to  capture.  Rasselas  and  his  sister 
leave  their  Happy  Valley  to  fare  through  the  world 
in  search  of  contentment.  They  find  many  strange 
things,  and  some  sad  ones;  they  find  wisdom  and 
folly,  work  and  idleness,  pleasure  of  the  voluptuary 
and  asceticism  of  the  hermit,  all  strivings  and  all 
miseries — but  not  contentment.  In  the  end  they  go 
back  to  the  Happy  Valley,  dedicating  themselves  to 
the  idea  of  service  to  their  own  people,  a  beneficent 
rule.  Johnson  never  says  that  idleness  is  better  than 
work,  that  folly  is  as  good  as  wisdom:  he  says  only 
that  life  is  for  every  one  of  us  something  other  than 
we  expect  it  to  be,  and  that  we  have  not  learned  the 
secret  of  what  life  is  until  we  stop  abusing  it  for  not 
living  up  to  our  misconception  of  it.  This  is  not 
pessimistic  doctrine :  it  is  wise  counsel,  based  on  one  of 
the  eternal  verities,  deriving  its  sweetness  from  a 
pervasive  mild  melancholy  far  removed  from  cyni- 
cism, and  its  strength  from  the  universal  applicabil- 
ity of  its  one  central  truth  about  life. 

This  kind  of  appeal  through  a  large  general  truth,  of 
which  Rasselas  is  one  of  the  purest  examples,  makes 
the  least  possible  demand  on  our  third  care,  for 
Originality.  One  can  indeed  distort,  but  one  can 
hardly  invent,  the  eternal  verities;  and  for  this  rea- 
son the  one  element  of  the  novel  that  would  best  not 
undertake  to  be  new  is  its  philosophy.  But  there  is 
another,    and    probably    more    important,    kind    of 


34  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

Truth  by  Representation,  which  does  interlock  with 
the  necessity  of  being  original.  The  novelist  makes 
use,  whether  he  mean  to  or  not,  of  general  truths 
about  the  world  and  about  man's  life  therein;  but 
this  fact  is  not  so  arresting  as  his  citizenship  in  the 
largest,  most  universal  state  that  has  ever  existed, 
the  state  of  our  common  Human  Nature.  The  novel- 
ist must  provide  something  new  in  human  character 
and  personality,  at  the  same  time  that  he  observes 
the  universally  experienced  laws  of  animal  behaviour, 
the  common  stock  of  motive  and  impulse,  passion  and 
sentiment.  He  must  be  master  of  similarity  in  dif- 
ference; he  must  acquaint  us  with  new  beings,  the 
elements  so  mixed  in  them  that  we  feel  them  as 
definite  additions  to  our  world,  and  yet  he  must  weave 
them  out  of  the  old,  old  substances,  the  desires  we 
have  all  known,  the  contradictions  and  incongruities 
that  are  parts  of  all  of  us — the  human  nature  that 
we  all  partake  of.  The  folk  we  meet  in  his  pages 
must  be  themselves,  yet  like  ourselves ;  their  hearts 
must  beat  in  echo  to  the  common  heart  of  mankind, 
yet  somehow  in  a  different,  an  individual  and  per- 
sonal rhythm. 

This  achievement  alone  can  be  called  "creative" 
in  the  most  elemental  sense  known  to  literary  art. 
The  creation  of  a  new  character  is  akin  to  the  stroke 
of  cosmic  creation  which  brings  something  out  of 
nothing,  substance  out  of  the  void  and  the  breath  of 
life  out  of  the  inert  substance.  If  we  consider  the 
pre-eminence  in  our  English  imaginative  literature 
of   three   names,    Chaucer,    Shakspere,    Dickens,    we 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE        35 

shall  find  its  secret  in  the  host  of  complete,  rounded, 
and  original  pieces  of  human  nature  which  throng  to 
our  memory  at  the  mention  of  those  names.  Their 
human  creations  represent  the  world,  our  world  of 
action  and  emotion,  all  complete ;  and  they  represent 
themselves  too,  they  are  creatures  that  were  never  in 
the  world  before. 

For  this  elemental  creative  power  there  is  no  rival 
and  no  substitute.  Ingenuity  and  experience  can  ac- 
count for  originality  of  setting,  the  preparation  of 
new  hues  and  blends  of  local  colour;  ingenuity  and 
labour  can  devise  plots  whose  sequences  shall  seem 
new.  But  only  the  most  impersonal  and  selfless 
genius  can  create  a  Pardoner,  a  Falstaff,  a  Mr.  Sapsea, 
or — to  add  one  other  novelist  who  lives  principally  in 
his  fewer  created  personalities — an  Uncle  Toby. 
Having  this  power,  a  great  novelist  can  almost  afford 
to  lack  everything  else.  It  has  been  said  of  Dickens 
that  his  characters  were  good  "so  long  as  he  could 
keep  them  out  of  his  stories."  His  minor  characters 
are  more  alive  than  the  major  characters  of  most 
writers ;  and  we  care  little  whether  they  carry  on  the 
story  or  not,  so  long  as  they  consent  to  live  on  before 
us  in  that  "perpetual  summer  of  being  themselves." 
Some  critics  have  said  that  Laurence  Sterne's  prin- 
cipal stock-in-trade  was  his  whimsical  nicety  in  sala- 
cious innuendo.  Not  so:  for  his  name  would  long 
since  have  been  forgotten  had  he  not  affixed  it  to 
Uncle  Toby,  the  real  immortal. 

Shall  we  let  Fielding  speak  for  us  once  more,  on 
this  subject  of  Human  Nature? 


36  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

"The  provision,  then,  which  we  have  here  [i.  e.,  in 
Tom  Jones]  made  is  no  other  than  Human  Nature. 
Nor  do  I  fear  that  my  sensible  reader,  though  most 
luxurious  in  his  taste,  will  start,  cavil,  or  be  offended, 
because  I  have  named  but  one  article.  The  tortoise — 
as  the  alderman  of  Bristol,  well  learned  in  eating, 
knows  by  much  experience — besides  the  delicious  cali- 
pash and  calipee,  contains  many  different  kinds  of 
food ;  nor  can  the  learned  reader  be  ignorant,  that  in 
human  nature,  though  here  collected  under  one  gen- 
eral name,  is  such  prodigious  variety,  that  a  cook  will 
have  sooner  gone  through  all  the  several  species  of 
animal  and  vegetable  food  in  the  world,  than  an  au- 
thor will  be  able  to  exhaust  so  extensive  a  subject. 

"An  objection  may  perhaps  be  apprehended  from 
the  more  delicate,  that  this  dish  is  too  common  and 
vulgar;  for  what  else  is  the  subject  of  all  the  ro- 
mances, novels,  plays,  and  poems,  with  which  the 
stalls  abound?  Many  exquisite  viands  might  be  re- 
jected by  the  epicure,  if  it  was  a  sufficient  cause  for 
his  contemning  of  them  as  common  and  vulgar,  that 
something  was  to  be  found  in  the  most  paltry  alleys 
under  the  same  name.  In  reality,  true  nature  is  as 
difficult  to  be  met  with  in  authors,  as  the  Bayonne 
ham,  or  Bologna  sausage,  is  to  be  found  in  the  shops." 


VI 

And  now,  the  fourth  and  final  matter,  Artistic  Fu- 
sion.    There  will  be  more  to  say  about  unity  in  the 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       37 


work  of  fiction  when  we  come  to  some  of  the  inter- 
esting problems  of  design;  but  at  least  I  may  throw 
out  here,  as  obvious  and  self-explanatory,  the  sugges- 
tion that  a  skilfully  written  novel,  however  complex 
and  various  its  elements,  must  be  in  some  sense  single, 
of  a  piece;  that  the  various  elements  must  be  woven 
somehow  into  a  texture.  Character,  action,  and  scene 
must  be  parts  of  each  other;  at  the  least  they  must 
hold  an  interdependent  relation,  strike  their  several 
notes  in  a  larger  harmony.  When  I  said  a  moment 
ago  that  we  could  almost  concede  Dickens  his  place 
on  the  strength  and  living  originality  of  his  charac- 
ters alone,  I  was  trusting  a  good  deal  to  the  "almost." 
The  art  of  fiction,  when  really  a  fine  art,  cannot  di- 
vorce character  from  action,  any  more  than  Thwackum 
and  Square  could  divorce  real  ideas  from  conduct. 
And  if,  in  addition  to  its  scene  and  action  and  char- 
acter, the  novel  contain  general  truisms  about  life, 
those  too  must  come  legitimately — that  is,  logically 
and  inevitably — out  of  the  action,  at  once  governing 
and  explaining  it ;  they  must  not  be  simply  the  gratu- 
itous plastered-on  opinions  of  the  author.  His  af- 
fair is  to  create  his  puppets  and  then  let  them  seem 
to  manage  their  own  destinies:  let  him  not  jerk  them 
this  way  and  that  on  wires  palpably  of  his  own  con- 
triving. 

Of  course  really  strong  and  persuasive  action  is 
that  which  seems  to  come  out  of  the  characters'  own 
wills,  or  out  of  their  own  weaknesses.  An  action 
which  we  all  recognize  as  the  only  one  open  to  the  given 
person  in  the  given  situation  has  artistic  inevitability. 


38299 


K> 


38  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

An  act  which  divides  our  opinions  and  starts  argu- 
ments among  critics  may  be  dubiously  contrived,  an 
artistic  shortcoming;  or  the  character  may  be  ex- 
ceedingly complex  or  vacillating,  so  that  inevitability 
is  less  determinate.  An  act  which  stamps  its  own  pre- 
posterousness  on  our  minds  means  that  the  artist  has 
suffered  a  lapse  of  co-operation  between  his  persons 
and  his  plot.  These  considerations  are  self-evident: 
one  can  do  no  more,  and  no  less,  than  state  them. 
But  the  obviousness  of  the  principle  does  not  lessen 
the  difficulty  of  the  practice;  and  the  perfect  fusion, 
on  a  grand  scale,  of  action  and  character  is  an  ob- 
jective attained  by  only  a  few  supreme  books  in  Eng- 
lish, and  by  only  a  handful  of  authors  in  the  whole 
history  of  fiction. 

There  is  another  relation  which  can  be,  though  it 
usually  is  not,  as  intimate  as  that  between  action  and 
character:  that  of  scene  or  setting  on  one  hand  to 
action  and  character  on  the  other.  In  the  novel  up 
to  about  1860,  we  find  comparatively  little  subtlety 
in  the  reported  effects  of  the  place  upon  the  person. 
In  Fielding,  in  Scott  even,  places  are  depicted  only 
as  a  stage  is  set:  that  the  drama  may  have  a  local 
habitation  and  not  proceed  in  vacuo.  At  least  such 
authors  as  these  two  are  safe  from  the  modern  craze 
for  local  colour  as  a  thing  of  independent  interest, 
however  irrelevant;  that  craze,  now  happily  on  the 
wane,  is  the  ultimate  debasement  of  background. 
Most  of  the  local  colourists  of  a  decade  ago  ought  to 
have  written  travelogues,  not  novels;  one  laughs  with 
Mr.  Ellis  Parker  Butler  through  the  few  pages  of  his 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       39 


skit,  ' '  The  Scenic  Novel, ' ' x  written  at  their  expense, 
and  suspects  meanwhile  that  most  of  them  are  laugh- 
ing at  themselves  by  this  time.  Mere  local  colour, 
most  often  painted  on  so  thick  that  it  scales,  is  de- 
cidedly not  enough;  nor  did  Mr.  Kipling,  who  unin- 
tentionally set  the  vogue,  ever  pretend  in  his  own 
practice  that  it  was  enough.  One  should  either  be  a 
scientific  explorer  of  the  impalpable  effects  of  region 
and  clime,  or  else  content  one's  self  with  the  simple 
old  fashion  that  treats  scene-shifting  as  merely  a 
necessary  evil. 

But  scene  as  mere  background,  for  reality's  sake 
or  adornment's,  is  not  the  ultimate  fusion  of  fine 
craftsmanship.  Through  the  romantic  revival,  with 
its  sudden  interest  in  the  external  world  of  nature, 
and  on  through  the  period  of  humanitarianism,  one 
finds  a  steadily  increasing  sense  of  the  rapport  be- 
tween man  and  man's  habitat.  Gray  had  this  sense 
in  the  Elegy;  Goldsmith  had  more  than  a  smattering 
of  it  in  The  Deserted  Village.  It  first  crept  into  the 
novel,  I  believe,  through  the  "School  of  Terror"; 
Mrs.  Radcliffe  among  others  used  it  for  cunning,  if 
somewhat  tawdry,  effects  of  mystery  and  horror.  In 
the  Irish  novels  of  Miss  Edgeworth,  in  the  Scottish 
novels  of  Scott,  the  scene  becomes,  however  uncon- 
sciously, something  a  little  more  than  the  picturesque 
frame  it  was  meant  to  be ;  and  when  we  come  to 
Dickens  we  come  to  a  host  of  characters  who  are  the 
creatures  of  their  environment.  After  this,  the  way 
is  made  straight  to  such  pieces  of  atmosphere  as  the 

i  The  Kccnic  Novel.  By  Ellis  Parker  Butler.  Atlantic 
Monthly,  March,  1911. 


40  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

Wuthering  Heights  of  Emily  Bronte  and  The  Return 
of  the  Native  of  Hardy — to  name  perhaps  the  most 
significant  developments  in  this  kind  on  either  side 
of  George  Eliot's  earlier  novels.  The  hither  end  of 
the  tendency  is  to  be  found  in  those  highly  specialized 
stories  of  the  Five  Towns  in  which  Mr.  Arnold  Ben- 
nett works  out  to  great  elaboration  the  theory  that 
people  derive  their  habits,  their  ideas,  the  texture 
of  their  personalities,  from  the  source  of  their  liveli- 
hood. Farther  than  this  the  novel  can  hardly  go  in 
interpreting  character  as  suffused  and  permeated  with 
the  "spirit  of  place." 

From  these  few  scattered  historical  items  it  will  ap- 
pear that  mere  novelty  of  setting,  or  even  mere  schol- 
arly fulness  of  reproduction,  is  not  an  important  end 
in  itself — 'that  is,  for  the  novel.  A  skilful  harmony 
between  the  simplest  folk  and  the  simplest  environ- 
ment will  communicate  more,  and  endure  longer,  than 
the  greatest  elaboration  without  that  harmony,  as 
may  be  seen  in  the  contrast  between  Silas  Marner, 
the  least  pretentious  of  George  Eliot's  "novels  of 
memory,"  and  Romola,  the  most  pretentious  of  her 
novels  of  scholarship.  In  Romola  she  does  all  that 
scholarship  can  do  for  the  Florence  of  the  Cinque- 
cento;  she  marshals  it  before  us,  a  tremendous  his- 
torical pageant.  But  through  it  walks  Romola  her- 
self, a  great  woman  indeed,  but  rather  a  womanly 
British  maiden  of  mid- Victorian  time  than  a  girl  of 
Florence  and  the  Renaissance.  The  incongruity  de 
feats  both  the  largeness  of  the  design  and  the  scholar- 
ship of  the  details.     Similarly,  the  tales  of  Captain 


THE     CREATIVE     IMPULSE       41 

Marryatt  are  full  of  sea  parlance,  the  rigging  and 
maneuvering  of  ships;  Captain  Marryatt  knows  the 
sea,  as  a  trade,  as  well  as  any  one  who  has  ever  written 
of  it.  But  he  does  not  know  the  sea  as  a  spell,  as  a 
creator  of  men  in  its  own  mysterious  image;  and  to 
this  day  there  is  more  authentic  salt  in  one  of  Smol- 
lett's sailor  men  roaring  out  strange  oaths  in  the 
tap-room  of  some  quiet  village  ale-house  many  miles 
from  the  sea,  than  there  is  in  all  the  ship's  companies 
on  all  the  decks  of  Captain  Marryatt 's  fiction. 


II 


ROMANCE 


Whoever  talks  with  any  consecutiveness  about  the 
history  of  fiction,  or  the  ideals  and  processes  of  fic- 
tion, drops  sooner  or  later  into  the  terminology  of  a 
traditional  classification,  that  represented  by  the  two 
words  "realism"  and  "romance."  Already  we  have 
stumbled  upon  these  two  intrusive  and  irrepressible 
words,  and  heard  them  put  in  their  claim  to  definition. 
I  said,  perhaps  too  debonairly,  that  the  more  roman- 
tic a  novelist's  theme  inherently  is,  the  more  realistic 
must  be  his  dealing  with  it,  if  his  result  is  to  do  suc- 
cessful traffic  with  the  reader's  credulity.  1  need 
not  bother  to  defend  the  statement,  which  will  doubt- 
less commend  itself  to  the  intelligence  as  true  in  gen- 
eral within  the  meaning  of  its  context,  though  open, 
like  all  general  principles,  to  exception  and  modifica- 
tion. Nor  need  I  recur  again  to  realism  of  that 
lower  order  which  governs  the  choice  and  transcrip- 
tion of  authentic  details  and  circumstances  from  life, 
and  which  we  may  call  the  realistic  technique  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  realistic  spirit.  But  we  are  still 
very  much  in  the  challenging  presence  of  the  prob- 
lem in  definition  propounded  by  the  word  ' '  romance, ' ' 
without  some  solution  of  which  there  is  no  rational 
approach  to  a  tenable  ground  of  interpretation  and 
criticism. 

For  my  part,  I  confess  that  I  name  the  romantic 

45 


46  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

spirit  with  misgiving,  and  study  it,  or  what  I  may 
provisionally  speak  of  as  being  it,  with  bafflement. 
As  a  youngster  of  fifteen,  devouring  Fenimore 
Cooper  as,  I  fancy,  youngsters  of  fifteen  still  do,  I  was 
quite  confident  of  my  own  ability  to  draw  the  tight 
straight  line  between  one  kind  of  fiction  that  is  ro- 
mantic and  nothing  else,  and  another  kind  that  is 
realistic  and  nothing  else.  But  the  slightly  older 
youngster  begins  to  see  that  there  is  a  misty  mid- 
region  between  romance  and  realism,  and  that  the 
boundaries  of  the  two  are  indefinable  rather  than 
precise,  movable  rather  than  fixed.  And  eventually 
he  sees  pure  romance  and  pure  realism  as  being  like 
nothing  so  much  as  the  invisible  extremes,  the  infra- 
red and  the  ultra-violet,  of  the  colour  spectrum,  which, 
being  invisible  to  so  coarse  an  organ  as  the  sensual 
eye,  may  be  said  for  rough  pragmatic  purposes  not 
to  exist.  The  million  gradations  and  mixtures  in 
between,  they  exist.  And  so  do  the  million  grada- 
tions and  mixtures  of  romance  and  realism ;  but  the 
more  one  reads  and  thinks  about  what  one  has  read, 
the  more  one  suspects  that  pure  romance  and  pure 
realism  are  as  the  infra-red  and  the  ultra-violet  of 
the  spectrum — concepts  of  the  mind,  practically  at- 
tainable it  may  be  in  that  consummation  where  the 
artist  in  words  shall 

".  .  .  splash  at  a  seven-league  canvas,  with  brushes  of  com- 
ets' hair," 

but  seen  in  their  purity  thus  far  on  no  canvas  of  the 
finite  and  mortal  novelist,  nor  in  the  transient  flame 


ROMANCE  47 


of  any  one  of  those  beacons  which  the  young  adven- 
turing' minds  are  for  ever  setting  up  on  the  changing 
shore-line  of  art.  The  poet  and  teller  of  tales  whose 
line  I  have  just  quoted,  himself  a  more  than  ordin- 
arily puzzling  example  of  realism  and  romance  min- 
gled, addresses  himself  to  the  True  Eomance  as  to  a 
goddess  and  guide;  but  in  the  very  phrases  which 
pledge  him  to  the  True  Romance  he  says,  with  one  of 
the  fine  despairs  of  faith — 

"Thy  face  is  far  from  this  our  war, 

Our  call  and  counter-cry ; 
I  shall  not  find  Thee  quick  and  kind, 

Nor  know  Thee  till  I  die. 
Enough  for  me  in  dreams  to  see 

And  touch  Thy  garment's  hem: 
Thy  feet  have  trod  so  near  to  God 

I  may  not  follow  tliem." 

Herein  he  is  like  a  mystic  devotee  groping  after  the 
unknowable,  and  half  realizing  the  while  that  all  the 
virtue  is  in  the  groping,  not  in  the  knowing. 

And  so,  as  1  talk  about  romance,  I  confess  it  is  with 
growing  doubts — not  merely  whether  there  is  any  ro- 
mance, but  also,  supposing  romance  to  exist  definably, 
whether  the  distinction  between  it  and  realism  is  as 
valuable  as  we  sometimes  try  to  make  it  out.  A  one- 
time President  of  Dartmouth  College  who  made  the 
opening  prayer  at  a  gathering  of  college  presidents 
met  to  consider  problems  of  academic  administration 
(also,  in  its  way,  a  difficult  and  indeterminate  sub- 
ject) closed  his  invocation  with  these  words,  the  sly 
humour  of  which  could  not,  I  think,  have  been  wholly 


48  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

lost  on  the  Almighty:  "0  Lord,  preside  over  our 
deliberations;  and  may  our  conclusions  be  wise  ones 
— so  far  as  we  come  to  any  conclusions."  There  is 
room  for  the  same  attitude  of  intellectual  humility 
in  the  consideration  of  romance.  And  at  the  end  of 
all  our  discussing  and  defining,  we  need  not  feel 
wholly  cheated  if  we  discover  that  what  we  have  dis- 
cussed and  defined  is  not  after  all  the  romance  we 
seek,  but  another,  perhaps  the  highest,  kind  of  real- 
ism. For  if  romance  does  not  exist  with  all  the  im- 
portance we  attach  to  it  in  our  thought,  if  the  spirit 
that  animates  creative  effort  in  fiction  is  one  and  one 
only,  then  it  is  something  to  have  discovered  the  limi- 
tations of  our  common  categories  and  to  have  found 
the  point  at  which  our  terminology  breaks  down. 


II 


So  far,  the  argument  goes  along  on  a  rather  high 
plane.  To  descend:  "We  may  doubt  the  sway  of 
romance  as  a  spirit,  but  we  hardly  question  the  exist- 
ence or  the  prestige  of  romances.  These  we  have  in 
infinite  bulk,  subject  to  a  hundred  changing  modes 
and  conventions, 

"Part  good,  part  bad ;  of  bad  the  longer  scroll." 

It  is  romance  as  a  spirit,  the  ruling  element  common 
to  all  the  works  which  we  call  romances,  that  needs 
investigating;  a  goal  or  ideal  that  has  something  to 
do  with  the  purpose  and  the  meaning  of  fiction.    Ro- 


ROMANCE  49 


mance  as  a  school  or  a  fashion  is  traceable  enough  in 
literary  history,  if  only  one  have  the  knowledge  or  the 
patience.  It  concerns  the  technique  and  the  subjects 
of  fiction,  rather  than  its  purpose  and  meaning;  and 
for  that  reason  we  go  at  it  cavalierly,  knowing  it  for 
a  counterfeit  of  the  thing  we  seek,  and  not  the  thing 
itself. 

Even  at  these  lower  and  lowest  levels,  romance  is 
a  complex  thing  to  define,  because  the  word  is  so  vari- 
ously used,  and  made  the  half  of  so  many  antitheses. 
We  know  what  the  Romantic  Movement  was:  it  was 
a  movement  in  revolt  against  classicism,  authority,  re- 
straint, formalism,  and  the  ancient  past,  and  toward 
individualism,  socialism,  humanitarianism,  imagina- 
tion, nature,  mysticism,  and  the  mediaeval  past ; — 
and  only  incidentally  was  it  a  movement  toward  ro- 
mances. But  we  call  a  detective  story  a  romance,  lit- 
tle though  it  has  to  do  with  any  of  the  crucial  things 
of  the  Romantic  Movement ;  and  every  one  of  these 
crucial  things  has  as  much  to  do  with  realism  as  with 
romance.  When  we  say  that  Byron  was  a  romantic 
poet,  we  use  a  word  of  known  values,  referable  as  it 
were  to  a  sort  of  gold  standard  of  meaning ;  but  when 
we  say  that  Mrs.  Radeliffe  or  Maturin  or  Scott  was 
a  romantic  novelist,  we  do  not  know  what  system  of 
currency  we  are  handling,  or  what  rates  of  exchange 
apply  to  it.  We  may  mean  something  profoundly 
important ;  or  we  may  mean  only  that  Mrs.  Radeliffe 
invented  her  scenery  instead  of  observing  it,  that 
Maturin  tried  to  make  you  shiver  instead  of  trying 
to  make  you  laugh,  that  Scott  wrote  about  Crusaders 


50  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


and  Cavaliers  instead  of  about  green-grocers  and  poli- 
ticians. It  is  easy  enough  to  say  and,  on  this  lower 
plane  of  mere  fashions,  true  enough  that  Scott  and, 
after  him,  Stevenson  were  romantic ;  Jane  Austen  and 
Thackeray  and  George  Eliot  realistic ;  Bulwer-Lytton 
romantic  when  he  wrote  Kienzi  aud  realistic  when  he 
wrote  My  Novel.  It  is  easy  enough  to  say  this;  but 
it  is  much  less  easy  to  be  sure  just  what  we  mean  by 
it.  All  the  common  labels  have  their  truth  if  we 
affix  them  suggestively  enough,  but  they  sometimes 
palpably  refuse  to  stick ;  they  turn  up  at  the  corners. 
To  exemplify:  We  say  that  romance  has  its  inter- 
est more  in  actions  than  in  persons;  but  that  is  true 
only  of  melodrama.  We  say  that  romance  arbitrarily 
suppresses  many  common  facts,  whereas  realism  wel- 
comes all  facts  that  are  true ;  but  the  basis  of  all  art, 
realistic  or  romantic,  is  selection,  and  therefore  ex- 
clusion. We  say  that  romance  is  idealistic;  but  all 
great  literature  is  idealistic  with  it — and  moreover 
where  is  the  idealism  in  the  average  detective  "ro- 
mance"? We  say  that  realism  deals  with  the  usual, 
romance  with  the  unusual ;  but  the  usual  of  today 
is  the  unusual  of  tomorrow — and  has  Addison  become 
a  romantic  because  the  coffee-house  no  longer  exists, 
or  can  Stephen  Crane's  extraordinarily  realistic 
story  The  Red  Badge  of  Courage  be  turned  into  a 
romance  by  the  sunrise  of  that  remote  day  which  shall 
see  war  archaic,  obsolete?  Clearly  the  technical  di- 
visions of  realistic  and  romantic  do  not  stand  or  fall 
by  such  factitious  matters.  Similarly,  most  of  the 
other   common   distinctions   of   text-book   and    class- 


ROMANCE  51 


room  can  be  reduced  to  absurdity.  Nor  will  it  help 
us  much  to  say  that  romance  colours  life  whereas  real- 
ism simply  copies  it ;  for  good  realism  is  not  primarily 
photographic,  and  both  romance  and  realism  invent 
life.  You  can  hardly  copy  what  you  have  invented; 
you  can  only  copy  what  some  one  else  has  invented — 
which  is  plagiarism. 

No :  one  cannot  define  even  the  mechanical  traits 
and  tendencies  of  romance  by  any  such  makeshift 
formula?.  Nor  will  all  one's  inquiries  be  likely  to 
bring  a  more  substantially  paying  answer  than  this : 
— Every  age  has  its  dominant  qualities,  and  wearies 
of  them.  Those  qualities  may  be  actually  the  virtues 
of  the  age,  but  it  wearies  of  them  just  the  same: 
nothing  bores  an  age  more  inexorably  than  its  own 
virtues  in  excess,  become  static  and  in-growing. 
Thereupon  arises  the  need,  or  at  least  the  demand, 
for  a  counter-irritant,  taking  the  form  of  whatever, 
being  most  remote  and  therefore  most  seductive,  re- 
minds the  age  of  what  it  would  like  to  be  and  makes 
it  forget  what  it  is — or  at  least  what  it  seems  to  itself, 
which  may  be  a  very  different  thing.  That  remote 
and  seductive  ideal  is  the  romance  of  the  age,  and 
the  works  dominated  by  that  ideal  are  its  romances. 
The  supreme  charm  for  us  all  is  in  something  which  is 
somewhere  else— in  the  clouds,  or  on  the  inaccessible 
horizon,  or  in  the  past,  or  behind  the  veil  of  the  fu- 
ture. You  have  to  have  only  a  fairly  large  number 
of  people  all  wanting  the  same  thing  which  they  have 
not  got,  to  create  the  conventions  of  a  school  of  ro- 
mance.    Those  conventions  will  change  as  soon  as  the 


52  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

people  have  got  what  they  wanted  or,  more  probably, 
ceased  to  want  it ;  and  then  their  romances,  so  far  as 
they  referred  to  that  want  and  nothing  else,  will  cease 
to  be,  or  will  remain  to  later  ages  as  the  property  of 
immature  or  restless  minds  who  know  not  what  they 
want.  That  is  why  the  romances  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe 
ceased  to  be  everybody's  romances  and  became  the 
romances  of  boarding-school  girls.  That  is  why  Mr. 
W.  L.  George  says 1  that  Scott — in  whom  Mr.  George 
sees  only  the  trappings  and  conventions — is  "reduced 
to  a  juvenile  circulation." 

This,  then,  is  the  kernel  of  our  notion  of  romance 
according  to  the  popular  classifications:  It  is  the 
product  of  a  set  of  conventions  based  on  a  popular 
demand,  the  reaction  of  an  epoch  against  that  in  itself 
with  which  familiarity  has  bred  contempt.  We  call 
this  work  realism,  and  that  romance,  first,  last,  and 
always  by  purely  mechanical,  transient,  and  often 
flimsy  conventions. 

To  illustrate:  The  17th  century,  without  hav- 
ing undergone  any  real  change  of  conscience,  sub- 
mitted itself  to  a  set  of  suppressions,  political,  social, 
and  religious,  which  became  more  and  more  distaste- 
ful. There  was  presently  to  be  a  wide-spreading 
revolt  against  the  Puritan  spirit,  the  puritanical  life ; 
it  was  to  take  such  forms  as  the  Restoration,  the  licen- 
tious Restoration  drama,  the  satires  of  Butler,  and  the 
pseudo-classicism  of  Dryden.  But  before  the  time  was 
ripe  for  these,  there  came  a  sort  of  false  dawn  of 

i  In  Anatole  France  (Writers  of  the  Day) .  By  W.  L.  George. 
New  York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co. 


ROMANCE  53 


emancipation,  of  which  false  dawn  one  of  the  very 
first  rays  was  the  so-called  "heroic  romance,"  first 
imported  from  Paris  in  free  translation,  later  closely 
imitated  in  London.  The  Grand  Cyrus  of  the  Scud- 
erys  is  the  best  known  of  the  importations ;  the 
Aretina,  a  juvenile  work  of  Sir  George  Mackenzie, 
famous  jurist  and  founder  of  the  Advocates'  Library 
of  Edinburgh,  is  selected  by  Professor  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh  to  represent  the  native  crop.  In  all  the  works 
of  this  school,  the  17th  century  protests  against 
its  own  life  of  bourgeois  stuffiness  by  imagining  for 
itself  characters  of  impossible  grandeur  and  magnilo- 
quence, heavily  brocaded  kings,  queens,  and  nobles 
who  strut  and  bombast  their  way  through  scenes 
neither  ancient  nor  modern,  speaking  a  language  never 
spoken  by  man — no,  nor  woman  neither — and  pat- 
terned of  conceits  more  affected  than  those  of  Euphues 
himself.  Congreve,  a  born  realist,  said  in  the  Preface 
to  his  Incognita:  "Romances  are  generally  composed 
of  the  constant  Loves  and  invincible  Courages  of 
Hero's  and  Heroines,  Kings  and  Queens,  Mortals  of 
the  first  Rank,  and  so  forth:  where  lofty  Language 
miraculous  Contingencies  and  impossible  Perform- 
ances, elevate  and  surprise  the  Reader  into  a  giddy 
Delight,  which  leaves  him  flat  upon  the  Ground,  when- 
ever he  gives  off,  and  vexes  him  to  think  how  he  has 
suffer 'd  himself  to  be  pleased  and  transported,  con- 
eern'd  and  afflicted  at  the  several  passages  he  has 
read."  Thus  even  Congreve,  separated  by  only  a  few 
years  from  this  effeminate  school — the  Aretina  was 
dedicated,   as  Professor  Raleigh  notes,   "to   all   the 


54  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

Ladies  of  this  Nation" — could  see  what  we  see  more 
plainly  still,  that  the  "heroic  romance"  was  really 
most  unheroic  bombast,  a  thing  consisting  exclusively 
of  conventions  wrought  out  of  a  momentary  desire, 
and  as  ephemeral  as  the  desire  itself. 


Ill 


The  history  of  literature  seems  to  show  that  ro- 
mance based  on  conventions  always  does  one  of  two 
things,  both  of  which  prove  the  infirmity  of  romance 
so  bred  and  so  nourished.  It  either  sinks  into  the 
ground,  leaving  hardly  any  trace,  as  this  "heroic 
romance"  of  the  17th  century  did,  or  else  it  finds  its 
way  to  some  renewal  of  which  the  most  important  in- 
gredient is  not  the  romantic  convention  but  the  realis- 
tic feeling  and  purpose.  The  18th  century  "School 
of  Terror,"  the  novel's  contribution  to  the  Romantic 
Revival,  illustrates  this  second  possible  destiny. 

The  Romantic  Revival  sought  after  the  mediaeval 
spirit — often,  it  must  be  admitted,  seeking  it  where  it 
was  not.  The  first  or  pseudo-classical  part  of  the 
century  used  the  word  "Gothic"  to  signify  whatever 
was  repellently  bizarre,  grotesque,  and  medievally 
ugly;  the  second  or  romanticist  part  of  the  century 
used  the  same  word  to  denote  the  seductiveness,  the 
mystery,  and  the  glamour  of  the  mediaeval  past. 
Gothicism  came  to  be  a  fad  about  the  time  that 
Horace  Walpole,  brilliant  politician  and  man  of  wit, 
built    his  famous  country   house    in    imitation    of   a 


ROMANCE  55 


feudal  castle  (a  very  bad  piece  of  architecture,  by 
Ruskin's  standard  of  beauty-in-utility).  Walpole 
also  wrote  The  Castle  of  Otranto,  and  so  became  the 
first  to  lend  fashionable  countenance  to  the  tribe  of 
ghosts  and  apparitions  that  "squeaked  and  gib- 
bered" and  groaned  in  musty  vaults  and  dim  wind- 
swept corridors  until  the  time  when  Jane  Austen's 
Northanger  Abbey  let  in  the  sunlight  of  common 
sense  upon  them  and  proved  them  pasteboard  and 
phosphorus.  We  wonder  now  how  the  poet  Gray 
could  have  shivered  all  night  over  the  ghostly  mock- 
heroics  of  Otranto,  and  especially  how  he  could  have 
owned  up  to  it;  we  wonder  how  The  Old  E7iglish 
Baron  of  Clara  Reeve  and  The  Mysteries  of  Udolpho 
of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  could  have  set  a  generation  of  teeth 
chattering.  To  us,  these  and  the  other  works  of  their 
sort  mean  simply  the  discontent  of  the  18th  century 
with  its  own  curtailed  imaginative  life,  its  materialis- 
tic and  rather  grossly  hearty  physical  life;  it  wanted 
to  get  out  of  itself  into  the  past,  and  any  readiest 
naive  misconception  of  the  past  would  do. 

Nevertheless,  the  School  of  Terror,  unlike  the  heroic 
romance,  did  lead  to  something.  It  left  a  double  leg- 
acy, the  first  and  most  important  half  of  which  was 
the  rationally  and  nationally  historical  fiction  of 
Scott.  It  was  but  a  step  from  the  unreal  past  peopled 
with  ghosts  to  the  real  past  peopled  with  people. 
Scott,  who  was  very  genuinely  and  painstakingly  an 
antiquarian  and  archaeologist  before  he  was  a  novel- 
ist or  even  a  poet,  turned  the  convention  of  mediaeval- 
ism  into  something  other  and  greater  than  a  conven- 


56  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

tion.  He  kept  the  glamour  of  the  past  but  not  its 
ghosts;  he  let  that  glamour  clothe  and  surround  folk 
who  are  as  real  as  you  or  I,  and  when  he  wrote  about 
a  ghost  he  was  likeliest  to  do  it  as  a  joke — as  in 
Wandering  Willie 's  Tale.1  In  short,  Scott  saved  some 
of  the  conventions  of  romance  by  the  amount  and  kind 
of  faithful  realism  which  he  put  with  them.  We  give 
his  tales  their  label  of  "historical  romance"  because 
of  the  superficial  convention  by  which  it  is  easiest  to 
identify  them — very  much  as  it  is  easiest  to  identify 
one's  partner  at  a  dance  by  her  clothes.  But  one 
enjoys  one's  partner,  at  least  one  does  if  one  is  lucky, 
for  her  wit  or  grace  or  good  sense;  and  we  read  the 
tales  of  Scott  because  they  give  us  the  Crusades, 
Feudalism,  Cavalier  and  Roundhead,  the  Covenanters, 
Scotland,  a  whole  pageant  of  diversified  human  na- 
ture— in  a  word,  life.  "Whether  it  is  being  lived  or 
has  been  lived  makes  little  difference :  underneath  the 
trappings  and  the  shifting  attendant  circumstances, 
it  is  all  of  the  same  stuff.  It  is  the  revelation  of 
sameness,  not  the  difference  of  dress,  that  counts — and 
that  revelation  is,  in  the  profoundest  sense,  realism. 

No  need  to  debate  the  more  minute  problem  of 
whether  the  Middle  Ages  were  actually  as  Scott  por- 
trayed them.  They  are  real  enough  so  that  he  takes 
us  into  them  for  the  sake  of  what  he  can  show  us  there ; 
whereas  Walpole  merely  takes  us  out  of  the  present 
for  the  sake  of  what  he  cannot  show  us  there.  Scott 
means  the  rich  sufficiency  of  the  historic  past;  the 

1  In  Redgauntlet,  Letter  Eleventh  of  the  Introduction. 


EOMANCE  57 


School  of  Terror  means  the  unsatisfying  emptiness  of 
the  present. 

We  classify  Scott,  then,  as  a  romancer,  but  value 
and  cling  to  him  for  his  fundamental  realism.  It  is 
not  a  thoroughgoing  realism ;  but  what  there  is  of  it 
is  truth. 

This  discrepancy  in  our  treatment  of  Scott  brings 
us  to  the  very  important  question:  How  can 
the  accoutrements  and  the  machinery  of  romance  be 
made  to  serve  a  purpose  and  a  meaning  essentially  re- 
alistic ?  What  objective  of  the  great  realists  do  Scott 
and  other  romancers  find  it  easier  to  reach  through  the 
convention  of  their  chosen  medium,  romance?  The 
answer  brings  us  very  near  to  the  point  where  the 
duality  of  realism  and  romance  disappears  and  the 
two  merge. 

All  great  art  deals  somehow  with  the  strangeness  of 
things.  Under  the  most  striking  portrait,  the  most 
impressionistic  interpretation  of  a  landscape,  the  most 
fantastic  piece  of  humour,  the  most  intimate  and  faith- 
ful transcription  of  man's  individual  or  social  life, 
there  lies  a  sense  that  any  aspect  of  reality  has  only 
to  be  known  through  and  through,  or  from  the  right 
angle,  to  become  seductively  mysterious,  obscurely 
wonderful.  The  better  we  know  things,  the  more 
amazing  they  are.  Of  this  part  of  the  credo  of  all 
good  imaginative  art,  there  is  a  consummate  expres- 
sion in  the  following  words  by  one  of  America's  great- 
est, and  least  known,  tellers  of  strange  tales : 

"It  is  to  him  of  widest  knowledge,  of  deepest  feel- 


58  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

ing,  of  sharpest  observation  and  insight,  that  life  is 
most  crowded  with  figures  of  heroic  stature,  with 
spirits  of  dream,  with  demons  of  the  pit,  with  graves 
that  yawn  in  pathways  leading  to  the  light,  with  ex- 
istences not  of  earth,  both  malign  and  benign — min- 
isters of  grace  and  ministers  of  doom.  The  truest 
eye  is  that  which  discerns  the  shadow  and  the  por- 
tent, the  dead  hands  reaching,  the  light  that  is  the 
heart  of  the  darkness,  the  sky  'with  dreadful  faces 
thronged  and  fiery  arms.'  The  truest  ear  is  that 
which  hears 

'Celestial  voices  to  the  midnight  air, 
Sole,  or  responsive  each  to  the  other's  note, 
Singing — ' 

not  'their  great  Creator,'  but  not  a  negro  melody, 
either;  no,  nor  the  latest  favourite  of  the  drawing- 
room.  In  short,  he  to  whom  life  is  not  picturesque, 
enchanting,  astonishing,  terrible,  is  denied  the  gift 
and  faculty  divine,  and  being  no  poet  can  write  no 
prose. ' ' x 

All  the  great  effects  of  literature  depend  on  some 
sort  of  paradox,  surprise,  redistribution  of  emphasis, 
or  re-reading  of  the  obvious  and  superficial  meanings 
of  things.  The  general  message  of  art  is  that  things 
are  not  what  they  seem;  and  the  temporary  formulae 
of  art  are  simply  this  or  that  man's  convenient  way 
of  expressing  this  truth.  Realism  is  the  fashionable 
formula  of  this  hour,  romance  has  been  that  of  some 
other  hours. 

1  The  Opinionator,  pp.  244-5.  New  York  and  Washington: 
The  ISTeale  Publishing  Co.,  1911. 


ROMANCE  59 


Now,  it  is  obvious  that  the  historical  romancer 
finds  ready  and  at  his  disposal  an  extraordinary 
measure  of  this  paradox  or  inverted  emphasis.  He 
finds  it  in  the  one  most  typical  and  traditional  arti- 
fice of  the  historical  novel :  the  subordination  of  great 
folk  whom  we  distantly  know  in  history,  and  the 
emergence  of  other  folk  whom  we  have  never  heard 
of.  Richard  the  Lion-Hearted  exists  not  for  Saladin 
and  Limoges,  but  for  Ivanhoe ;  Savonarola  is  brought 
into  being,  not  as  revivalist,  politician,  and  martyr, 
but  as  a  decisive  factor  in  the  moral  history  of  Ro- 
mola;  Erasmus  the  great  humanist  becomes  a  little 
child  that  we  may  read  the  love  story  of  his  parents. 
Great  things  that  we  think  of  ordinarily  as  having 
wrought  certain  great  ends  exist  now  for  other  and 
lesser  ends.  And  if  the  revised  version  in  the  ro- 
mance is  less  true  to  fact,  we  know  in  our  hearts  that 
it  is  much  more  true  to  life. 

The  effect  is  as  that  of  sudden  personal  knowledge 
of  a  famous  man.  You  idealize  him  or  denounce  him, 
follow  his  career,  vote  for  him,  vote  against  him,  read 
his  books  or  review  them,  see  him  through  a  mist  of 
his  importance  and  inaccessibility:  then  you  spend 
a  week-end  in  the  same  house  with  him,  and  find  that 
your  personage  is  after  all  a  person.  He  reads  the 
Barchester  novels  once  a  year,  likes  to  whittle  out 
toys  for  children  with  his  jack-knife,  and  thinks  your 
father's  old  teacher  of  Roman  History  was  the  great- 
est man  he  ever  met.  Your  personage  has  suddenly 
conferred  a  mysterious  greatness  upon  ordinary  things 
through  their  association  with  him,  and  humanity  upon 


60  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

himself  through  his  interest  in  them.  Proportion  is 
restored ;  he  is  part  of  the  life  you  know ;  and  for  the 
first  time  you  begin  to  see  him  somewhat  as  he  sees 
himself,  and  to  know  what  are  his  real  realities. 

Some  such  effect  as  this  comes  out  of  historical 
novels  in  which  the  heroes  are  other  than  the  heroes 
of  history.  Great  events  and  great  personages  win  a 
sudden  new  glamour  by  coming  near  to  us ;  and  little 
events  and  persons  are  magnified  by  being  brought 
near  to  them.  The  pulse  quickens  as  the  novelist  puts 
us  suddenly  face  to  face,  by  a  twist  of  romantic  arti- 
fice, with  the  one  strangest  yet  most  familiar  thing 
in  the  world,  the  miracle  of  our  common  humanity. 
That  swift  raising  of  a  veil  or  an  iron  mask,  the  chief 
trick  of  our  romancer's  entire  bagful,  is  accomplished 
then  for  a  purpose  altogether  realistic — the  revelation 
of  things  as  they  are,  and  of  the  strangeness  of  their 
being  so. 

IV 

In  the  face  of  such  considerations,  I  find  it  possible 
to  answer  in  but  one  way  the  question  whether  we 
value  "romantic"  fiction  most  for  the  romance  in  it 
or  for  the  realism.  Romance  is  only  a  system  of  con- 
ventions; and  if  only  those  conventions  are  present, 
we  do  not  permanently  value  the  product  at  all. 
Great  or  enduring  romance  makes  use  of  those  con- 
ventions for  precisely  such  ends  as  belong  to  the 
realist.  Romance  concerns,  then,  the  medium,  the 
means  and  technique,  of  fiction,  and  has  the  least 


ROMANCE  61 


possible  to  do  with  its  purpose  and  meaning.  For 
the  sake  of  convenient  categories,  we  say  that  the 
realistic  use  of  remote  and  unfamiliar  material  is 
romance,  and  that  the  realistic  use  of  near 
and  familiar  material  is  realism.  But  this  simply 
means  that  one  writer  knows  best,  as  Scott  did,  the 
remote  and  unfamiliar;  another,  as  his  contemporary 
Jane  Austen  did,  the  near  and  familiar.  Each  trav- 
els where  he  knows  the  trails;  but  there  is  only  one 
destination  worth  talking  about.  Speak  of  "ro- 
mance" as  you  will  in  discussing  the  how  and 
whence  of  fiction,  you  are  necessarily  talking  about 
realism  when  you  discuss  its  why,  its  purpose  and 
meaning.  Romance  is  only  a  specialized  technique ; 
that  is,  a  somewhat  circuitous  way  of  getting  to  a 
destination.  All  fiction  is  truly  great  in  so  far  as  it 
is  realistic  in  spirit,  other  things  being  equal;  and 
there  are  no  true  artists  but  those  who  are  at  bottom 
realists. 

So  at  least  we  seem  to  make  out  when  we  consult 
that  side  of  the  School  of  Terror  which  leads  to  the 
historical  novel  as  written  by  Scott.  When  we  in- 
spect its  other  legacy,  of  horror  and  "spinal  shiver," 
the  psychic  and  the  phantasmal,  we  find  again  that 
the  mere  conventions  of  romance,  in  order  to  save 
their  lives  at  all,  had  to  be  translated  into  terms  of 
realism.  The  mediaevalism  of  the  School  of  Terror 
leads  to  Scott ;  the  psychic  abnormality  of  the  School 
of  Terror  leads  to  Poe  and  Hawthorne.  We  shall 
have  traced  in  our  minds  the  symmetrical  curve  of 
the  modern  ghost  story  if  we  see  that  it  had  its  life 


62  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

in  the  realism  of  The  Apparition  of  Mrs.  Veal,  its 
romantic  death,  in  Walpole  and  the  other  Terrorists, 
and  its  complete  resurrection  in  such  things  as  The 
Turn  of  the  Screw  of  Henry  James  and  Ambrose 
Bierce's  tales  of  the  ghostly  and  the  ghastly.  This  is 
the  complete  cycle  in  outline.  The  renewal  of  the 
psychic  begins  in  England  with  Charles  Robert 
Maturin,  whose  Melmoth  the  Wanderer  is  perhaps 
oftener  referred  to  than  read,  though  it  is  still  pos- 
sible to  read  it  with  interest.  On  the  Continent,  de 
la  Mott-Fouque  and  Jean  Paul  Richter  are  the  names 
which  correspond ;  that  is,  the  names  which  imply  Poe 
and  Hawthorne  a  little  later.  These  two  American 
masters  are  midway  of  the  upward  curve.  Using  in- 
deed the  old  bottles  of  supernaturalism  and  terror, 
they  fill  them  nevertheless  with  the  new  wine  of  some- 
thing akin  to  scientific  interpretation.  They  are  half- 
way back  to  realism;  and  it  is  the  infiltration  of 
realism  into  their  romance  which  makes  them  live. 

It  may  seem  a  loose  and  rather  wild  classification 
which  puts  Poe  and  Hawthorne  together,  antithetical 
as  they  are  at  many  points — the  one  a  Puritan  in  in- 
heritance and  temperament  if  not  in  code,  the  other 
as  nearly  unmoral  as  human  nature  can  be,  and  with- 
out any  moorings  in  either  place  or  time.  But  let  us 
see.  In  their  separate  ways  they  are  both  most  ab- 
sorbed, the  one  intensely,  the  other  deeply,  in  the 
meaning  and  the  results  of  sin  in  the  individual  life, 
and  most  preoccupied  with  the  stress  and  mystery  of 
man's  relation  with  his  own  heart.  The  message  of 
both  comes  to  something  like  the  inexorable  hounding 


ROMANCE  63 


of  conscience — 'though  Hawthorne  is  interested  in  con- 
science as  an  agent  of  the  moral  law,  Poe  only  as  an 
agent  of  torture,  a  screw  to  be  applied  to  human  will 
until  it  cracks.  One  is  a  moral  judge,  the  other  a 
moral  anatomist ;  but  the  art  of  either  finds  its  centre 
in  human  sin,  its  nature  and  its  inevasible  conse- 
quences. In  The  Scarlet  Letter,  as  Professor  Wood- 
berry  has  said,  ' '  sin  now  staining  the  soul  ...  is  the 
theme;  and  the  course  of  the  story  concerns  man's 
dealing  with  sin,  in  his  own  breast  or  the  breasts  of 
others."1  In  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  the 
burden  of  past  misdoings  presses  down  upon  the  life 
of  the  present,  to  render  it  sinister  and  futile. 
' '  '  Shall  we  never,  never  get  rid  of  this  law  ? '  '  cries 
Holgrave.  "  'It  lies  upon  the  Present  like  a  giant's 
dead  body.'  "  In  the  earlier  of  these  stories  man 
struggles  pettily  to  evade  the  consequences  of  his  own 
sin ;  in  the  later,  he  is  foredoomed  by  ancestral  wrongs 
which  are  beyond  righting. 

With  Poe,  this  sense  of  the  omnipresence  of  evil 
takes  two  special  forms :  first,  a  tireless  interest  in  that 
evil  perversity  of  human  nature  which  makes  each 
man,  as  Oscar  Wilde  said,  "kill  the  thing  he  loves"  in 
order  to  torture  his  own  soul;  and,  second,  a  vivid 
appreciation  of  the  disintegrating  effect  of  remorse 
upon  the  sanity.  Poe  trying  to  create  pure  fantasy, 
as  in  The  Narrative  of  A.  Gordon  Pym,  is  too  jejune 
for  interest ;  but  we  remember  the  Poe  who  understood 
the  paradox  that  there  is  a  perverse  pleasure  in  self- 

i  'Nathaniel  Hawthorne  (American  Men  of  Letters  Series),  p. 
193.  By  George  E.  Woodberry.  Boston  and  New  York: 
Houghton  Mifflin  Co.,  1902. 


64  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

inflicted  pain,  and  the  truism  that  no  man  can  long 
live  sanely  with  the  darkest  elements  of  his  own  na- 
ture.    And  this  is  Poe  the  realist. 

Both  writers  falsify  the  truth  of  life  by  suppression 
of  part.  Hawthorne  expresses  the  moral  rigour  of 
cisatlantic  Puritanism,  but  not  its  hope  of  forgiveness 
and  redemption;  Poe  expresses  the  soul's  capacity  for 
evil  and  for  remorse,  but  not  its  capacity  for 
renunciation,  noble  endeavour,  and  self-discipline. 
In  both,  the  abnormal  predominates ;  but  so  far  as 
they  continue  to  be  read  on  their  merits  as  authors, 
not  merely  for  their  prestige  as  classics,  they  are  read 
because  the  abnormality  which  they  portrayed  is  ac- 
tually there,  a  pervasive  and  inescapable  part  of  life. 
Their  artificial  suppressions  and  their  lack  of  actual 
knowledge  of  what  life  is  may  together  cost  them 
length  of  literary  life ;  but  while  they  live  at  all,  they 
live  because  they  traced  human  impulse  and  motive 
inward  to  dark  secret  sources. 

Starting  then  with  the  two  chiefly  romantic  impulses 
of  the  School  of  Terror,  medievalism  and  psychic 
horror,  we  find  that  each  saves  itself  by  becoming 
transmuted  into  something  else  which  is  not  ulti- 
mately romantic  at  all ;  and  that  the  amount  of  sal- 
vation is  just  about  in  proportion  to  the  amount  of 
realism  acquired.  The  vague  Gothicism  of  the  18th 
century  becomes  the  true  historical  sense  of  Scott ;  its 
monsters  become  the  balanced  human  beings  of  Scott; 
its  apparitions  turn  into  the  spectres  of  old  sins  come 
back  to  prey  on  the  soul ;  its  re-echoing  ghostly  voices 
become    conscience.     The    historical    novel    explores 


ROMANCE  65 


widely  and  freely  among  outward  realities  of  space 
and  past  time;  the  fiction  of  Poe  and  Hawthorne  ex- 
plores deeply  within,  subjecting  the  heart  and  the 
brain  to  analysis  of  whatever  is  most  corrosive  there. 
Still  other  strata  of  our  fiction  have  demonstrably  this 
same  romantic  foundation ;  but  they  all  alike  abandon 
more  and  more  the  strangeness  of  life  as  it  is  not  for 
the  still  greater  strangeness  of  life  as  it  is. 


V 


Perhaps  we  have  come  too  long  a  way  round  for  so 
simple  a  result.  It  is  obvious  enough  a  priori  that 
all  fiction  is  based  on  life,  and  that  the  worth  of  the 
fiction  is  contingent  on  the  fulness  and  truth  of  the 
vision  of  life.  Fulness  and  truth  in  the  vision,  these 
are  the  chief  tests  of  a  great  realism ;  and  if  great 
realism  happen  to  fall  in  a  romantic  school  or  vogue, 
that  makes  ultimately  but  little  difference.  The 
realist  loves  life,  as  his  own  eye  sees  it,  too  well  to  miss 
any  of  the  savour  of  its  actuality ;  he  whom  we  call  a 
romancer  loves  life  too  well  not  to  array  it  in  fine  ves- 
tures, shape  it  to  the  mould  of  a  heroic  tradition,  and 
make  it  trail  clouds  of  glory.  This  is  the  unimportant 
and  passing  difference.  But  they  both  love  life. 
That  is  the  essential  similarity;  and  it  is  more  im- 
portant than  any  difference. 

If  then  we  come  upon  a  piece  of  literature  which 
distorts  the  nature  of  life,  we  shall  have  to  call  it  bad 
literature;  that  is,  non-realistic  literature.     For  the 


66  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

test  of  realism,  which  is  the  test  of  excellence,  is  fidel- 
ity to  the  nature  of  life.  Romance  is  a  kind  of  real- 
ism which  undertakes  to  reveal  the  nature  of  life 
while  claiming,  perhaps,  some  licence  in  its  handling 
of  the  mere  facts  of  life.  Realism  undertakes  to  be 
faithful  both  to  the  nature  and  the  facts  of  life,  and 
needs,  as  we  have  seen,  to  discharge  both  of  its  re- 
sponsibilities. If  what  we  call  romance  distort  both 
the  facts  and  the  nature  of  life,  it  fails  and  dies ;  and 
the  meaning  of  its  failure  is  not  that  it  was  bad  ro- 
mance, recreant  to  facts,  but  that  it  was  bad  realism, 
recreant  to  the  truth  which  is  above  the  facts. 

I  have  meant  not  so  much  to  deny  the  difference 
between  realism  and  romance  as  to  belittle  its  signifi- 
cance. There  is  a  difference;  and  it  is  of  some  in- 
cidental importance  to  the  novelist  that  he  shall  be  in 
the  vogue  of  his  generation,  for  the  fashion  is  prodigi- 
ously important  to  the  commerce  between  producer 
and  public,  and  many  a  romancer  has  missed  his  mark 
by  using  a  sort  of  ammunition  which  went  with  older 
firearms,  long  superseded.  But  we  are  speaking  of 
the  target ;  and  here,  we  insist,  the  white  is  one  thing 
and  one  only — the  truth  and  the  meaning  of  life  as 
men  and  women  live  it. 

Consider,  for  an  illustration  and  a  test,  a  page  of 
Scott,  from  A  Legend  of  Montrose.  Angus  M'Aulay 
has  dined  in  London  at  the  house  of  Sir  Miles  Mus- 
grave,  where  were  put  on  the  table  six  candlesticks 
of  solid  silver;  and  Angus,  touched  in  his  Scotsman's 
local  pride,  has  sworn  that  he  has  "mair  candlesticks, 
and  better  candlesticks,  in  his  ain  castle  at  hame,  than 


ROMANCE  67 


were  ever  lighted  in  a  hall  in  Cumberland,"  and  has 
backed  up  his  oath  by  the  wager  of  a  sum  which  he 
does  not  possess.  Behold  the  outcome,  in  the  Scottish 
halls  of  M'Aulay:— 

' '  Donald,  as  they  were  speaking,  entered,  with  rather 
a  blither  face  than  he  might  have  been  expected  to 
wear,  considering  the  impending  fate  of  his  master's 
purse  and  credit.  'Gentlemens,  her  dinner  is  ready, 
and  her  candles  are  lighted  too,'  said  Donald,  with  a 
strong  guttural  emphasis  on  the  last  clause  of  his 
speech. 

"  'What  the  devil  can  he  mean?'  said  Musgrave, 
looking  to  his  countryman. 

"Lord  Menteith  put  the  same  question  with  his 
eyes  to  the  Laird,  which  M'Aulay  answered  by  shak- 
ing his  head. 

"A  short  dispute  about  precedence  somewhat  de- 
layed their  leaving  the  apartment.  Lord  Menteith 
insisted  upon  yielding  up  that  which  belonged  to  his 
rank,  on  consideration  of  his  being  in  his  own  country, 
and  of  his  near  connection  with  the  family  in  which 
they  found  themselves.  The  two  English  strangers, 
therefore,  were  first  ushered  into  the  hall,  where  an 
unexpected  display  awaited  them.  The  large  oaken 
table  was  spread  with  substantial  joints  of  meat,  and 
seats  were  placed  in  order  for  the  guests.  Behind 
every  seat  stood  a  gigantic  Highlander,  completely 
dressed,  and  armed  after  the  fashion  of  his  country, 
holding  in  his  right  hand  his  drawn  sword,  with  the 
point  turned  downwards,  and  in  the  left  a  blazing 
torch  made  of  the  bog-pine.    This  wood,  found  in  the 


68  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

morasses,  is  so  full  of  turpentine,  that  when  split 
and  dried,  it  is  frequently  used  in  the  Highlands  in- 
stead of  candles.  The  unexpected  and  somewhat 
startling  apparition  was  seen  by  the  red  glare  of  the 
torches,  which  displayed  the  wild  features,  unusual 
dress,  and  glittering  [swords?]  of  those  who  bore 
them,  while  the  smoke,  eddying  up  to  the  roof  of  the 
hall,  overcanopied  them  with  a  volume  of  vapour. 
Ere  the  strangers  had  recovered  from  their  surprise, 
Allan  stepped  forward,  and  pointing  with  his 
sheathed  broadsword  to  the  torch-bearers,  said,  in  a 
deep  and  stern  tone  of  voice,  'Behold,  gentlemen  caval- 
iers, the  chandeliers  of  my  brother 's  house,  the  ancient 
fashion  of  our  ancient  name ;  not  one  of  these  men 
knows  any  law  but  their  chief's  command — Would 
you  dare  to  compare  to  them  in  value  the  richest 
ore  that  ever  was  dug  out  of  the  mine?  How  say 
you,  cavaliers  ? — is  your  wager  won  or  lost  ? ' 

' '  '  Lost,  lost, '  said  Musgrave  gayly — '  my  own  silver 
candlesticks  are  all  melted  and  riding  on  horseback  by 
this  time,  and  I  wish  the  fellows  that  enlisted  were 
half  as  trusty  as  these. — Here,  sir,'  he  added  to  the 
chief,  'is  your  money;  it  impairs  Hall's  finances  and 
mine  somewhat,  but  debts  of  honour  must  be  settled.' 

"  'My  father's  curse  upon  my  father's  son,'  said 
Allan,  interrupting  him,  'if  he  receives  from  you  one 
penny!  It  is  enough  that  you  claim  no  right  to  ex- 
act from  him  what  is  his  own.' 

"Lord  Menteith  eagerly  supported  Allan's  opinion, 
and  the  elder  M'Aulay  readily  joined,  declaring  the 
whole  to  be  a  fool's  business,  and  not  worth  speaking 


ROMANCE  69 


more  about.  The  Englishmen,  after  some  courteous 
opposition,  were  persuaded  to  regard  the  whole  as  a 
joke. 

"  'And  now,  Allan,'  said  the  Laird,  'please  to  re- 
move your  candles;  for,  since  the  Saxon  gentlemen 
have  seen  them,  they  will  eat  their  dinner  as  com- 
fortably by  the  light  of  the  old  tin  sconces,  without 
scornfishing  them  with  so  much  smoke.' 

"Accordingly,  at  a  sign  from  Allan,  the  living  chan- 
deliers, recovering  their  broadswords,  and  holding 
the  point  erect,  marched  out  of  the  hall,  and  left  the 
guests  to  enjoy  their  refreshments. ' ' x 

There  are  all  the  trappings  of  the  romantic,  in- 
cluding the  deliberate  effort  to  work  the  scene  up  to 
a  heightened  intensity  which  is  to  fiction  what  elo- 
quence is  to  speech.  But  in  what  is  the  chief  effect? 
Is  it  in  the  picturesqueness,  the  ornate  and  martial 
machinery  of  the  episode,  the  stage  fittings,  or  even 
in  the  triumph  of  the  character  who  enlists  our  sym- 
pathy— this  last  one  of  the  major  conventions  of  ro- 
mance? Or  is  it  in  the  loyalty  of  the  brother  who 
has  contrived  the  ruse,  the  most  human  joy  of  the 
aged  servitor  in  his  master's  triumph  and  the  op- 
ponent's discomfiture,  the  debonair  and  courtly  grace 
of  the  good  loser,  and  above  all  the  ringing  truth  be- 
hind the  whole  affair,  that  metals  are  dross  when 
weighed  in  the  balance  against  men?  In  these  latter 
things,  to  be  sure;  and  so  always  in  such  scenes  in- 
volving artificially  heightened  effects,  if  they  are  suc- 
cessful. 


i  A  Legend  of  Montrose,  Chapter  Fourth. 


70  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

The  novelist's  loyalty  to  life  varies  (shall  we  say?) 
as  man's  love  for  woman.  The  realist  is  the  indulgent 
lover  who  would  have  his  mistress  as  she  is,  who 
feels  that  any  change  would  be  a  loss,  because  it  would 
interfere  with  her  identity,  make  her  less  completely 
herself.  Your  romancer  is  the  passionate  lover  who 
cannot  bear  that  his  mistress  should  be  in  any  wise 
less  than  his  thought  of  her ;  he  covets  for  her  all  good 
things,  sees  in  her  all  possibilities ;  he  wants  her  to  be, 
not  exactly  someone  else,  but  as  it  were  more  in- 
tensely and  exclusively  herself.  He  is  like  a  man  who 
exaggerates  the  truth  for  sheer  love  of  the  truth. 
To  borrow  and  adapt  a  phrase,  the  romancer  exag- 
gerates life  in  the  direction  of  itself.  But  both 
realist  and  romancer  must  be  impersonal:  they  must 
love  life,  and  not  merely  themselves.  The  historical 
novel  must  take  us  out  of  the  present  because  there 
is  so  much  for  us  in  the  past — not  simply  to  take  us 
out  of  the  present.  If  what  the  romancer  provides  be 
only  an  easy  way  of  emotional  escape,  then  he  is  serv- 
ing, not  the  True  Romance,  but  only  a  shallow,  vain, 
and  egoistic  spirit  which  we  call  by  another  and  less 
honourable  name.  Between  that  lesser  spirit  and 
clean  romance,  or  clean  realism  either,  there  is,  as  we 
shall  see,  implacable  war.  But  there  is  no  war  be- 
tween romance  and  realism,  any  more  than  there  is 
between  true  science  and  true  religion. 


Ill 


SENTIMENTALISM 


On  some  sort  of  love  for  the  nature  of  life  rests, 
then,  all  sound  romance,  all  sound  realism.  There 
are  many  kinds  of  love.  The  novelist  may  love  life  as 
a  mistress  "uncertain,  coy,  and  hard  to  please,"  but 
worth  the  knowing  and  the  serving  for  all  that,  and 
on  her  own  terms;  he  may  be  in  two  minds  whether 
to  idealize  her  at  a  distance  or  to  defy  disenchantment 
in  the  nearest  intimacy,  like  Meredith's  lover  who 

"Fain  would  fling  the  net,  and  fain  have  her  free" ; 

or  he  may  trust  and  give  himself  completely  up  to 
her,  in  the  sure  knowledge  that,  though  she  may  both 
"bruise  and  bless,"  he  can  have  the  full  blessing  only 
as  he  accepts  the  bruises.  There  are  many  kinds  of 
love:  but,  for  the  novelist,  only  this  one  mistress. 
And  his  fundamental  loyalty  to  life  is  the  same 
whether  he  tend  to  interpret  life  realistically  or  to 
exalt  it  romantically. 

Now,  it  happens,  as  I  have  just  hinted,  that  the 
romantic  novelist  is  the  more  subject  to  a  certain 
grave  temptation  or  danger :  the  danger  of  substi- 
tuting self-love  for  love  of  life,  and  of  interpreting 
the  world  exclusively  as  a  ministry  to  self-delight. 
Professor  Irving  Babbitt  characterizes  the  romantic 
lover  in  poetry  by  comparing  him,  in  the  terms  of  a 

not  too  celebrated   mot,  to  the  domestic  cat  which 

73 


74  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

rubs  its  body  against  your  leg:  the  cat  does  not  love 
you,  it  "loves  itself  on  you."  So  the  romantic  lover 
may  prize  his  mistress,  not  for  what  she  is,  but  for 
her  reflection  of  him,  her  subtle  and  unanalysable 
appeal  to  his  own  vanity — or  to  his  own  humility, 
which  may  be  only  his  vanity  inverted.  And  so  the 
novelist  may,  if  there  be  too  little  of  the  impersonal  in 
his  fibre,  love  himself  on  life,  and  give  us,  for  all  his 
and  our  pains,  not  so  much  a  reading  of  what  life  is 
or  may  be  as  an  exhibition  of  his  own  private  needs 
and  greeds,  predilections  and  aversions,  prides  and 
shames.  He  may  part  company  with  the  realist,  who 
says:  "This  is  beauty,  because  it  is  truth,"  and  with 
the  romancer,  who  says :  ' '  This  is  truth,  because  it  is 
beauty"; — he  may  part  company  with  both,  and  say 
tacitly  no  more  than  "This  is  what  I  enjoy."  In 
short,  he  may  let  himself  be  animated  by  that  shallow, 
vain,  and  egoistic  spirit  which  we  call  sentimental  ism  ; 
the  spirit  which  produces  a  counterfeit  idealism,  a 
spurious  realism,  compound  of  self  plus  emotion. 
Because  the  romancer  has  a  freer  hand  with  the  cir- 
cumstances, and  is  less  rigidly  bound  by  what  he  sees 
before  his  eyes,  he  is  the  more  likely  to  stumble  into 
this  pitfall  of  self;  and  that  is  why  we  may  call  the 
spirit  of  sentimental  ism  an  underbred  country  cousin 
of  romance. 

Sentimentalism,  a  sickly  and  corrosive  thing,  is 
enormously  important  in  the  history  of  literature,  and 
especially  of  British  literature;  so  important  that  al- 
most any  episode  of  the  development  of  our  fiction 
might  be  recounted  as  a  struggle  of  sentimentalism 


SENTIMENTALISM  75 

against  its  counter-agents.  He  who  should  undertake 
to  tell  the  history  of  sentimentalisni  in  the  novel 
would  stand  committed  to  a  complete  history  of  the 
novel ;  for  in  each  generation  the  sentimental  spirit  is 
so  enlaced  with  the  general  evolution  of  fiction  that 
there  is  no  story  left  to  tell  except  that  of  the  senti- 
mental spirit  in  its  struggle  to  survive  against  strong 
opposition.  Everything  that  is  not  for  sentimental- 
ism  is  against  it,  and  has  been  so  ever  since,  in  the 
tremendous  decade  which  gave  the  English  novel  its 
modern  shape,  Richardson  sentimentalized  his  way 
into  the  popular  heart  and  Fielding  took  up  the  pen 
of  satire  to  drive  him  out.  The  clash  between  Pamela 
and  Joseph  Andrews  recurs,  in  one  way  or  another, 
from  decade  to  decade— not  so  spectacularly  perhaps, 
because  hardly  ever  again  with  so  near  an  approach 
to  equality  between  the  contenders,  but  nevertheless 
demonstrably  and  implacably.  The  man  of  feeling 
and  the  man  of  reflection  have  their  truces ;  hardly,  as 
yet,  a  permanent  peace. 

Sentimentalism  is,  however,  somewhat  more  than 
feeling.  If  it  had  to  do  merely  with  displays  of 
sensibility,  the  exhibition  of  tender  and  often  neurotic 
emotions  inadequately  grounded  in  ideas,  the  story  of 
it  might  be  a  long  one,  but  it  could  hardly  be  a  very 
subtle  one.  The  anatomist  of  the  sentimental  cultus 
beholds  his  real  difficulty  when  he  notes  that  senti- 
mentalism is  interpenetrated  with  other  substances, 
many  of  them  the  most  respectable,  and  that  some  of 
its  manifestations  are  of  a  sort  to  counterfeit  what- 
ever we  most  prize  in  motive  and  conduct.     Senti- 


76  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


mentalism  is,  indeed,  to  begin  with,  a  saturation  with 
sensibility,  the  very  dew-point  of  the  emotional.  But 
that  is  only  the  beginning  of  it.  After  we  have  taken 
sufficient  account  of  sentimentalism  as  hyperesthesia, 
we  find  other  expressions  of  it  past  numbering. 

Of  these  others,  I  may  single  out  four,  as  being 
perhaps  the  most  important  here,  through  their 
prevalence  in  literature. — 

First,  the  spirit  of  self-righteousness.  The  self- 
righteous  man  may  indeed  love  good  conduct;  but  it 
is  his  own  good  conduct  that  he  loves,  and  more  be- 
cause it  is  his  own  than  because  it  is  good.  This  is 
the  spirit  that  pities  the  sinful  because  they  are  so 
far  beneath  us  who  pity  them — we  think  how  wretched 
we  should  be  in  their  place.  It  is  also  the  spirit 
that  philanthropizes  and  confers  benefits  through  self- 
love.  To  give  material  succour  is  to  bask  in  the  glow 
of  one's  own  goodness — and  it  is  so  easy  to  purchase 
merit  thus ! 

Secondly,  the  spirit  of  vanity  or  grandiloquence  or 
bombast.  Mr.  Chesterton  has  arraigned  one  of  its 
modern  tricks  in  a  little  essay  called  Demagogues  and 
Mystagogues.1  This  is  the  spirit  that  identifies  one's 
self  in  a  proprietary  way  with  one's  profession  or 
one's  special  interests.  Fielding's  doctors  quarrel 
learnedly  together  about  how  the  arm  should  be  set, 
while  the  patient  lies  in  torture,  and  dispute  over  the 
corpse  to  settle  which  killed  him,  because  their  own 
dignity  must  be  upheld  whatever  becomes  of  the  sci- 

i  In  All  Things  Considered.  By  G.  K.  Chesterton.  New 
York:  John  Lane  Co.     MCMIX. 


SENTIMENTALISM  77 


ence  of  medicine ;  lawyers  deliver  their  paid  opinions 
in  a  jargon  which  none  can  understand,  because  their 
own  majesty  comes  above  that  of  the  law ;  the  school- 
master talks  about  education  as  though  he  were  its 
patron  saint,  the  dilettante  about  art  as  though  it 
were  a  helpless  orphan  committed  to  his  care,  and  the 
clergyman  about  God  as  though  he  were  a  benevolent 
and  rather  more  responsible  elderly  relative  of  God — 
say,  a  maiden  aunt.  An  inflated,  puffed-up  spirit 
this,  that  tries  to  dignify  itself  by  ownership  of  that 
which  is  beyond  any  personal  ownership. 

Thirdly,  the  self-deception  which  we  call  hypocrisy. 
For  probably  any  consistent  hypocrite  is  essentially  a 
self-deceiver.  No  man  can  dispense  in  the  long  run 
with  belief  in  himself;  and  hence  he  misreads  his 
own  motives,  forgets  whatever  would  confute  him  if 
he  remembered  it,  and  invents  the  most  plausibly  un- 
selfish motives  for  his  self-seeking.  The  young  lady 
continues  to  enjoy  her  roast  lamb  and  be  horrified  at 
the  trade  of  butchering,  and  thinks  quite  well  of  her- 
self in  both  connections;  Theobald  and  Christina — I 
am  referring  here  to  Samuel  Butler's  posthumous 
classic  The  Way  of  All  Flesh — continue  to  torture 
their  son,  out  of  a  dubious  mixture  of  self-righteous- 
ness, innate  love  of  cruelty,  and  the  sense  of  their 
own  power  and  authority,  and  persuade  themselves 
that  they  are  doing  it  all  for  the  good  of  the  son. 

Fourthly,  the  spirit  of  shallow  optimism,  that  sees 
everything  in  a  beautiful  mist  of  "rose-pink"  (Mere- 
dith's word)  ;  that  is  always  talking  about  "the  sordid 
things  of  life"  (meaning  things  which  are  not  pretty) ; 


78  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

that  creates  all  the  scores  of  sugar-plum-angel  men, 
women,  and  children — especially  children,  the  Sand- 
fords  and  Little  Evas  and  Pollyannas  of  sentimental 
fiction,  precocious  infants  with  a  diseased  passion  for 
making  you  cheerful  and  good : — the  spirit  that  says 
tacitly,  "This  is  the  world  /  made:  see  how  much 
nicer  it  is  than  that  dismal  real  world  of  obstinate 
facts  and  problems  without  solutions!  If  you  don't 
like  my  world  better  than  that,  it  must  be  that  you 
have  an  evil,  sordid  mind." 

These  four  spirits — self-righteousness,  vanity,  hy- 
pocrisy, and  the  fashionable  optimism — are  all  senti- 
mental :  they  all  set  up  the  first  person  singular  as 
above  the  impersonal  law  of  life,  and  study  the  world, 
if  they  study  it  at  all,  only  to  project  themselves  into 
it  for  the  self-satisfied  thrill  of  rediscovering  them- 
selves there.  The  sentimentalist  will  actually  inflict 
pain  on  himself  for  the  pleasure  of  seeing  himself 
bear  it  heroically;  he  will  tempt  others  into  despite- 
fully  using  and  persecuting  him,  in  order  to  anoint 
himself  with  the  soothing  oils  of  righteous  indignation 
and  self-pity.  The  peculiar  insidiousness  of  this  sen- 
timentalism  is,  in  fact,  that  it  nearly  always  concerns 
itself  with  well-meaning  and  well-doing,  and  by  its 
fruits  it  is  at  times  well-nigh  indistinguishable  from 
the  most  self-disciplined  and  impersonal  rule  of  life. 

II 

It  will  be  seen  that  these  subtler  manifestations  of 
sentimentalism  are  here  defined  as  simply  effects  of 


SENTIMENTALISM  79 


the  egoism   inherent  in  man,  and  with  little  or  no 
reference  to  the  goodness  or  badness  of  the  actual 
conduct  involved  or  advocated.     And  the  definition 
will,  I  think,  do  all  that  may  be  asked  of  it.     Senti- 
mentalism  is  primarily  not  a  sort  of  conduct,  but  a 
sort  of  spirit  behind  conduct;  and  the  same  acts  may 
be  prompted  now  by  a  sentimental  attitude,  again  by 
a  really  humane  or  social  spirit.     Emerson's  precept, 
"Love  and  you  shall  be  loved:  all  love  is  as  mathe- 
matically just  as  the  two  sides  of  an  algebraic  equa- 
tion," is  a  most  unsentimental  argument  for  loving 
much,  but  a  most  whiningly  sentimental  argument  for 
-  demanding  to  be  loved.     The  shilling  may  be  dropped 
into  a  beggar's  hat  to  afford  the  giver  enjoyment  of 
his  own  munificence,  or  to  do  penance  for  a  previous 
sin  of  greed,  or  to  avoid  the  self-accusation  of  stingi- 
ness   (all  sentimental   motives),  or  to  express  one's 
understanding  sympathy  for  another  life  that  thus 
becomes,  if  only  for  an  instant  and  a  shilling's  worth, 
one's  own.     It  is  the  same  shilling  in  any  case — but 
it  does  not  mean  the   same   thing.     And   of   course 
fiction  is  bound  to  be  concerned  above  all  with  what 
it  means. 

At  this  point  some  close  analyst  of  motive  takes  the 
floor  to  ask  whether  there  is  not,  behind  all  these  dis- 
tinctions, a  fundamental  sameness.  Whatever  we  do, 
and  whyever  we  do  it,  does  not  every  motive  originate 
in  self,  and  does  not  every  act  proceed  out  of  the  in- 
dividual's instinct  for  self-fulfilment?  One  man  de- 
spoils the  poor  to  increase  his  own  wealth :  another 
gives  out  of  what  he  has,  ostensibly  to  help  the  poor : 


80  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

but  is  not  this  merely  a  more  refined  and  sensitive 
selfishness,  the  very  quintessence  in  fact  of  self -grati- 
fication? To  which  we  must  return,  for  all  answer: 
"Yes,  we  do  indeed  at  every  turn  that  which  we  have 
the  most  and  the  strongest  reasons  for  wanting  to  do. 
There  is  no  unselfishness  in  the  sense  of  acts  which 
profit  us  nothing,  materially  or  morally.  But  that 
fact  does  not  abolish  the  infinite  gradations  in  the 
rewards  of  our  conduct.  It  is  precisely  of  those" 
gradations  that  the  novelist,  if  he  be  worthy,  must 
take  most  account.  All  conduct  does  originate  in 
self;  but  it  does  not  all  end  there.  Let  the  novelist 
look  to  it  that  he  express  his  own  will  in  conduct  which 
takes  the  self  outward  into  other  lives ;  which  identi- 
fies the  ego  with  other  egos,  and  reaches  across  the 
barriers  of  selfhood  to  some  sort  of  community."  In 
short,  there  is  a  self  that  expresses  itself  in  terms  of 
self,  with  reference  always  inward;  there  is  another 
self  that  has  the  outward  reference,  expressing  itself 
by  instinct  and  habit  in  terms  of  other  things — and 
this  second  self  is  an  entity  much  better  worth  ex- 
pressing. It  is  the  non-sentimental  ego.  Let  the 
novelist  understand  it,  and  be  it,  we  say;  else  his 
appeal  to  us  is  of  the  shallowest.  A.  murders  B. ; 
C.  gives  his  life  trying  to  save  B.  from  A.  Call  both 
acts  self-fulfilment,  as  ultimately  they  are :  all  we 
need  point  out  is  that  it  makes  a  great  deal  of  differ- 
ence what  kind  of  self  you  have  to  fulfil,  and  that  the 
novelist  does  well  to  choose  discriminatingly  which  he 
shall  hold  up  to  our  esteem. 


SENTIMENTALISM  81 


Or,  to  illustrate  the  same  matter  in  historical 
terms : — 

Eichardson  was  the  sentimentalist  incarnate. 
Fielding  was  the  satirist.  In  Pamela  Richardson  por- 
trayed a  somewhat  prudish  servant  girl  resisting  the 
attempts  of  her  libertine  master  to  seduce  her,  and  at 
last,  by  having  the  good  sense  to  keep  herself  inac- 
cessible, winning  his  hand  in  marriage.  Her  conduct 
is  right;  her  motive  a  rather  low  expediency — the 
virtue,  not  of  brave  and  thoughtful  idealism,  but  of 
convention  added  to  fear.  That  the  element  of  ex- 
pediency figures  largely  in  her  conduct  is  proved  by 
her  slavish  adulation  of  Mr.  B.  when  he  offers  her 
marriage.  He  has  behaved  monstrously  to  her,  made 
himself  loathsome  to  the  sense  of  decency — and  yet 
when  his  offers  cease  to  be  "illicit"  Pamela  can  only 
cry  out  in  melting  gratitude  at  his  angelic  condescen- 
sion. One  is  reminded  of  John  Tanner's  sarcastic  re- 
tort to  Octavius:  "So  we  are  to  marry  your  sister 
to  a  damned  scoundrel  by  way  of  reforming  her  char- 
acter!"— both  Octavius  and  Richardson  being  victims 
of  the  old  sentimental  confusion  of  "character"  with 
"reputation."  Pamela  shares  with  them  a  tawdry 
superstition  that  it  is  vile  for  a  coward  and  sneak  to 
possess  a  noble  woman  in  one  way,  but  eminently 
praiseworthy  and  satisfactory  for  him  to  possess  her 
in  another.  John  Tanner  and  Fielding  share  the 
somewhat  different  notion  that  it  is  detestable  for  a 
coward  and  sneak  to  possess  a  noble  woman  at  all, 
and  that  if  she  is  really  noble  she  will  see  him  for 


82  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

what  he  is,  and  despise  him  as  much  when  he  grovels 
before  her  as  when  he  tries  to  dominate  her  by  trick- 
ery or  force.  Fielding  took  Richardson's  theme  and 
turned  it  into  ridicule  by  inversion.  He  portrayed  a 
young  serving-man  who  resists  the  advances  of  his 
wanton  mistress — not  in  order  to  advocate  laxity  of 
conduct  against  Richardson's  narrow  rigidity,  but  to 
extinguish  with  burlesque  a  moralist  who  advocated 
the  narrowest  rigidity  for  the  most  dubious  reasons. 
Both  novelists  would  have  Pamela  guard  herself  well : 
but  one  of  them  would  have  her  do  it  for  reasons 
which  prove  her  a  sensible  creature  with  a  taint  of 
canny  self-righteousness,  the  other  for  reasons  which 
prove  her  a  noble  woman  of  some  capacity  to  think  for 
herself.  The  really  dramatic  crux  of  living  is  not  in 
conduct  but  in  motive. 

Now,  it  is  true  that  Fielding  savours  his  own  satire 
just  as  much  as  Richardson  does  his  own  sentimental- 
ism,  and  that  both  are  equally  far  from  philosophical 
disinterestedness.  But  one  finds  his  delight  in  a 
philosophy  which  makes  human  nature  out  a  pretty 
small  and  mean  affair,  even  when  it  is  doing  right; 
the  other,  in  a  philosophy  which  shows  human  nature 
as  having  an  infinite  capacity  for  constructive  good, 
even  when  it  is  doing  wrong.  Pamela  is  "Virtue 
Rewarded,"  with  the  insistence  on  the  reward;  Jo- 
seph Andrews  is  "Virtue  Rewarded,"  with  the  in- 
sistence on  the  virtue.  If  the  conventional  code  is  to 
recommend  itself  to  the  most  humane  minds,  it  must 
do  so  on  some  such  basis  as  Fielding's,  not  on  egoistic, 
self-seeking,   and   sentimental   grounds.     Safety   and 


SENTIMENTALISM  83 

profit  are  sentimental  motives  for  behaving  well :  good 
behaviour  finds  its  true  level  only  in  a  defiant  Tight- 
ness of  the  mind  to  which  self-violation  is  the  unbear- 
able wrong. 

This  difference  of  motive—the  difference,  let  us  call 
it,  between  sentimentalism  and  fine  taste — is,  I  repeat, 
all-important  to  the  worker  in  fiction.  He  will  have 
expressed,  when  all  the  words  are  written  down  and 
all  the  situations  resolved,  only  himself:  let  him  not 
think  he  can  escape  himself  utterly,  for  all  the  words 
and  all  the  situations  will  be  of  his  choice,  charged 
with  the  meanings  which  he  alone  has  given  them,  in- 
dicative of  his  purposes  and  ideals.  But  let  him  ex- 
press himself  in  terms  of  other  things,  of  ideals  which 
touch  more  than  his  self-interest;  let  him  be  like  the 
bank-note  that  changes  hands  only  to  reappear  as  its 
own  worth  of  food  or  clothing  or  firewood,  not  like 
the  coin  in  a  miser's  hoard,  which  can  only  draw  to 
itself  more  and  more  other  precisely  similar  coins, 
endless  vain  repetitions  of  itself,  to  be  gloated  over  in 
moments  of  sterile  ecstasy. 


Ill 


Of  course  I  should  not  wish  to  be  understood  as 
trying  to  read  Samuel  Richardson,  by  bell  and  book, 
out  of  his  importance  to  the  history  of  the  novel. 
If  I  undertook  that,  I  should  expect  no  better  reward 
than  laughter.  The  literature  which  makes  up  the 
whole  body  of  a  tradition  and  an  art,  and  which  is 


84  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

therefore  greater  than  individuals  and  their  books, 
has  never  required  that  flawlessness  which  the  most 
exactingly  critical  readers  think  it  well  to  demand  of 
their  book  before  they  will  consent  to  be  much  inter- 
ested in  it.  No:  literature  has  never  been  above 
teaching  itself  by  poor  beginnings,  the  half-suggestion 
of  merit  here,  even  the  downright  failure  there ;  and  in 
the  long  run  the  worth  of  most  things  is  found  to 
survive,  or  at  least  to  be  rediscovered,  in  order  that 
art  may  learn  every  important  lesson  that  exists  to 
be  learned.  Richardson  is  very  far  indeed  from  such 
feeble  and  half-profitless  beginnings,  matter  merely 
for  instruction  to  the  form  of  the  novel  after  his  ac- 
tual substance  has  been  found  wanting  and  cast  away. 
Indeed,  he  stands  much  nearer  to  the  full  success,  the 
triumphant  achievement  of  his  own  kind  of  greatness. 

That  greatness  lies,  so  far  as  a  sentence  will  describe 
it,  in  his  having  done  for  the  inner  world  of  the  heart 
what  Defoe  did  for  the  outer  world  of  material  cir- 
cumstance :  subjected  it  to  the  analysis  of  a  minute 
and  painstaking  realism,  anatomized  it  at  once  more 
truly  and  more  vividly  than  any  before  him  had  done. 
Richardson  is  the  first  in  the  novel  to  prove  that  moral 
or  mental  history  can  be  truly  dramatic,  and  that  any 
life,  even  the  most  commonplace,  can  be  made,  if  only 
it  is  understood,  to  yield  the  reader  finer  thrills  than 
had  hitherto  come  from  even  the  most  exciting  stories 
of  event. 

There  is  a  sense  too  in  which  Richardson  is  imper- 
sonal like  the  dramatist,  and  therefore  escapes  direct 
responsibility  for  the  opinions  which  his  characters 


SENTIMENTALISM  85 

hold  and  express;  for  his  stories  are  told  in  letters 
exchanged  by  the  characters  participating  in  them, 
and  no  one  questions  that  in  the  main  the  letters  ex- 
press genuine  and  natural  reactions  of  folk  who  are 
real,  permanent,  and  very  much  themselves.  But  the 
novelist  and  the  dramatist  cannot  escape  indirect  re- 
sponsibility: after  all,  they  are  undertaking  to  repre- 
sent life  for  us,  and  if  their  characters  represent  it 
only,  or  primarily,  at  and  below  a  certain  moral  alti- 
tude, we  shall  properly  say  that  their  conception  of 
life  is  insufficient.  The  artist  chooses  his  puppets  be- 
cause they  are  interesting  to  him ;  and  we  have  the 
right  to  say,  if  we  find  it  so,  that  he  is  relatively  too 
much  interested  in  the  wrong  ones,  the  ones  who  are 
beneath  the  best  that  we  know.  Richardson  speaks  in 
the  long  run  through  Pamela  just  as  intelligibly  as 
though  she  were  empowered  to  speak  directly  for 
him ;  and  we  hardly  need  the  various  prefaces  and 
conclusions  by  the  "Editor"  to  tell  us  that  he  was 
exactly  the  sentimentalist  his  choice  and  treatment 
of  Pamela  as  a  heroine  would  imply.  It  was  a  tre- 
mendous achievement,  and  an  influential  one,  to  have 
read  the  hearts  of  others,  and  those  not  of  his  sex,  so 
minutely  as  Richardson  did:  nevertheless,  we  cannot 
acquit  him  of  having  sentimentally  taken  those  hearts 
at  more  than  their  true  relative  worth,  or  of  having 
sentimentally  preached  a  dubious  ethic — superior  con- 
duct for  inferior  reasons. 

How  certainly  the  novel  can  be  trusted  in  the  end 
to  perpetuate  its  best  and  discard  its  worst  is  shown 
by  an  odd  fact  in  the  history  of  appreciation  of  Rich- 


86  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


ardson.  His  reputation  waxed  and  waned  and  waxed 
again,  and  has  now,  it  seems  to  me  as  I  gather  the 
consensus  of  recent  judgments,  all  but  regained  its 
old  prestige — and  that  in  spite  of  our  unanimous 
hatred  of  his  sentimentalism.  First  he  was  valued 
for  this  quality,  then  he  was  despised  for  it,  and  now 
he  is  valued  in  spite  of  it,  and  beeause  of  his  sympa- 
thetic and  minute  analysis.  Our  least  sentimental 
age  has  vindicated  Richardson,  one  of  the  most  senti- 
mental of  novelists,  thus  proving  abundantly  that 
there  is  more  in  him  than  the  sentimentalism,  and 
that  the  composite  intelligence  of  criticism  over  any 
great  stretch  of  time  has  a  sure  and  single  eye  for 
merit,  with  whatever  defects  that  merit  is  accompa- 
nied. 

But  it  was  the  sentimentalism  that  came  uppermost 
at  the  beginning ;  and  if  the  author  of  Clarissa  had  a 
beneficial  effect  on  the  novel  as  an  instrument  of  con- 
stantly increasing  scope,  I  do  not  see  how  we  can 
blink  the  fact  that  he  had  a  disastrous  effect  on  it  as 
a  revelation  and  criticism  of  the  true  values  of  life. 
I  cannot  give  up  my  distrust  of  sentimentalism  merely 
because  Richardson,  the  chief  of  sentimentalists,  hap- 
pened also  to  be  an  incomparable  anatomist  of  motive 
and  feeling;  and  I  see  him  as  one  of  the  chief  im- 
pulses in  the  debilitating  18th  century  cult  of  "sensi- 
bility." 

As  we  have  noted  before,  half  of  the  aesthetic  his- 
tory of  the  two  generations  after  Richardson  is  im- 
plied in  the  word  "Gothic"  and  the  changes  its  mean- 
ing underwent.     The  other  half  is  contained  in  this 


SENTIMENTALISM  87 

other  word  "sensibility,"  which  points  to  whatever  in 
emotion  is  overwrought,  hypersesthetic,  neurasthenic, 
and  at  the  same  time  super-refined  and  faddling. 
The  School  of  Terror  is  simply  Gothicism  plus  sensi- 
bility ;  and  Richardson,  a  realist  of  the  realists,  is  thus, 
through  his  emotionalism,  a  powerful  impulse  toward 
one  of  the  most  extravagant  romantic  traditions  ever 
evolved.  The  cult  of  sensibility  means  always  the 
maximum  of  feeling  for  the  minimum  of  cause;  and 
when  we  see  the  Terrorists  displaying  the  last  ex- 
tremities of  feeling  for  no  cause  that  we  can  do  better 
than  laugh  at,  we  see  them  reaping  the  natural  harvest 
of  Richardson  the  specialist  in  self-pity  and  tears. 
He  set  a  whole  age  weeping,  not  for  sorrow,  not  even 
for  romantic  Weltschmerz,  but  for  simple  enjoyment 
of  its  own  shallow  and  rather  maudlin  wretchedness. 
It  was  an  age  comparable  in  this  respect  to  the  board- 
ing-school miss  who  feels  herself  cheated  and  taken 
advantage  of  if  she  is  not  made  to  cry  at  the  matinee. 
She  goes  in  order  to  cry ;  and  the  latter  18th  century 
sometimes  strikes  us  as  having  existed  primarily  in 
order  to  feel,  over  anything  or  nothing,  the  extremes 
of  emotion. 

Not  since  that  time,  happily,  have  we  seen  senti- 
mentalism  in  anything  like  the  same  repute.  The 
prolonged  battle  between  the  man  of  feeling  and  the 
man  of  reflection  seems  at  last  on  the  verge  of  decision 
in  favour  of  the  man  of  reflection.  One  of  the  great- 
est of  living  novelists,  himself  anything  but  a  disciple 
of  Richardson  and  sensibility,  alludes  quite  naturally 
to  "the  unofficial  sentimentalism,  which,  like  the  poor, 


88  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

is  exceedingly  difficult  to  get  rid  of."  1  A  century  ago 
he  would  have  had  to  call  sentimentalism  official  in- 
stead of  unofficial.  It  has  never  died:  it  has  simply 
receded  farther  and  farther  into  the  underworld  of 
the  unsanctioned  in  art.  From  time  to  time  it  puts 
forth  powerful  reminders  of  its  hold  on  the  popular 
imagination:  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  is  one  of  those  re- 
minders, All  Sorts  and  Conditions  of  Men  another. 
Mrs.  Stowe  and  Sir  Walter  Besant,  in  other  stories 
the  most  guileless  and  innocuous  of  sentimentalists, 
attain  in  these  two  books  the  special  prestige  of  suc- 
cessful reformers.  But  elsewhere  we  see  the  sentimen- 
tal religion  disintegrate  into  a  dozen  specialized  and 
disunited  rituals — let  them  be  illustrated  by  the  ju- 
venile fiction  of  "Oliver  Optic"  and  the  not  so  con- 
sciously juvenile  formulae  of  E.-P.-Roe-ism.  In  gen- 
eral, it  may  be  said  that,  the  sentimental  novel  had 
pretty  well  given  up  its  claim  to  official  status  when  it 
went  into  paper  covers  about  the  year  1875 ;  and  there 
it  was  contentedly  to  stay  until  Mrs.  Florence  Barclay 
and  Mrs.  Alice  Hegan  Rice  and  half  a  dozen  other 
purveyors  of  blessedness,  mostly  feminine,  brought  it 
back  for  a  moment  to  the  factitious  dignity  of  cloth. 


IV 


The  official  death  of  sentimentalism  is  of  course 
very  different  from  its  extermination — which  is  even 

i  Preface   to    The    Nigger    of    the   "Narcissus."     By    Joseph 
Conrad.     New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.     1914.     P.  xii. 


SENTIMENTALISM  89 


now  only  a  possibility.  If  one  had  to  fix  a  date  for  its 
official  death,  I  suppose  that  date  might  well  be  1814, 
the  year  of  Wauerley.  But  the  edict  of  execution  had 
been  already  signed,  in  the  work  of  an  inconspicuous 
young  woman  of  twenty-three — the  most  precocious 
genius  in  our  fiction,  for  she  had  written  at  twenty- 
one  a  novel  all  but  perfect  in  both  the  form  and  the 
substance  of  its  contribution  to  the  human  comedy. 
In  1798,  the  year  of  the  Lyrical  Poems  and  Ballads 
and  a  great  milestone  in  romanticism,  Jane  Austen 
was  writing  her  third  novel,  Northanger  Abbey,  in 
which  she  took  the  spurious  romanticism  of  the  School 
of  Terror  and  made  it  ridiculous.  For  her  sunny  com- 
mon sense,  perhaps  neither  public  nor  publisher  was 
ready:  at  all  events  Northanger  Abbey  lay  neglected 
for  twenty  years,  wasting  its  diffusion  of  light  on  the 
proverbial  bottom  drawer,  like  priceless  radium  in  the 
heart  of  the  earth  waiting  to  be  discovered.  Writ- 
ten sixteen  years  before  the  publication  of  Waverley, 
it  appeared  four  years  after,  and  two  after  Jane  Aus- 
ten's death — the  first  of  her  stories  to  bear  her  name 
on  its  title-page. 

In  all  six  of  those  stories  Miss  Austen  made  merry 
with  sentimentalism ;  witness  the  title  Sense  and  Sen- 
sibility (i.e.,  Sense  versus  Sensibility).  But  no- 
where is  her  kindly  and  indulgent  ridicule  more  tell- 
ing than  in  an  early  episode  of  Northanger  Abbey. 
The  heroine,  a  girl  potentially  sensible  but  saturated 
with  romances  of  the  School  of  Radcliffe,  goes  in  a 
properly  sentimental  mood  to  visit  friends  at  North- 
anger Abbey.     She  is  eager  in  her  anticipation  of  the 


90  THE     MODERN. NOVEL 

ghostly,  the  grisly ;  her  visit  will  be  a  complete  fiasco 
unless  she  is  treated  to  at  least  an  apparition  or  two. 
Everything  goes  promisingly.  She  is  shown  on  the 
first  night  to  a  room  in  a  wing  of  the  Abbey;  her 
imagination  makes  it  baronially  large,  gloomy;  the 
wind  howling  at  the  casements  and  down  the  chimney 
does  what  it  can  to  make  up  for  the  footsteps  of  the 
ancient  servitor  which  should  reverberate  down  the 
long  corridor;  and — yes,  actually  there  is  the  one  in- 
dispensable appurtenance  of  such  situations,  a  dark 
and  formidable  cabinet  of  immemorial  age.  It  is 
there,  of  course,  that  she  is  to  find  the  time-yellowed 
manuscript  which  is  to  unlock  some  horrifying  secret 
of  the  past.  And,  tucked  away  in  a  recess,  is  indeed 
the  roll  of  papers.  She  seizes  it  with  tremors  of  ex- 
pectancy; in  another  instant  she  will  have  begun  to 
unravel  the  secret.  Then,  a  clumsy  attempt  to  snuff 
her  candle  puts  it  out  and  leaves  her  in  utter  dark- 
ness. Better  and  better!  She  lies  shivering  in  the 
great  bed,  a  prey  to  nameless  delicious  terrors  until 
sleep  comes.  With  the  morning  light  that  awakens 
her,  she  is  up  to  consummate  her  discovery.  Let  Jane 
Austen  tell  it: — 

"Her  greedy  eye  glanced  rapidly  over  a  page.  She 
started  at  its  import.  Could  it  be  possible,  or  did 
not  her  senses  play  her  false?  An  inventory  of 
linen,  in  coarse  and  modern  characters,  seemed  all 
that  was  before  her !  If  the  evidence  of  sight  might 
be  trusted,  she  held  a  washing-bill  in  her  hand.  She 
seized  another  sheet,  and  saw  the  same  articles  with 
little  variation;  a  third,  a  fourth,  and  a  fifth  pre- 


SBNTIMENTALISM  91 

sented  nothing  new.  Shirts,  stockings,  cravats,  and 
waistcoats  faced  her  in  each.  Two  others,  penned  by 
the  same  hand,  marked  an  expenditure  scarcely  more 
interesting,  in  letters,  hair-powder,  shoe-string,  and 
breeches-ball.  And  the  larger  sheet,  which  had  en- 
closed the  rest,  seemed  by  its  first  cramp  line,  'To 
poultice  chestnut  mare,'  a  farrier's  bill!  Such  was 
the  collection  of  papers  (left,  perhaps,  as  she  could 
then  suppose,  by  the  negligence  of  a  servant  in  the 
place  whence  she  had  taken  them),  which  had  filled 
her  with  expectation  and  alarm,  and  robbed  her  of 
half  her  night's  rest!  She  felt  humbled  to  the  dust. 
Could  not  the  adventure  of  the  chest  have  taught  her 
wisdom  ?  A  corner  of  it  catching  her  eye  as  she  lay, 
seemed  to  rise  up  in  judgment  against  her.  Nothing 
could  now  be  clearer  than  the  absurdity  of  her  recent 
fancies.  To  suppose  that  a  manuscript  of  many  gen- 
erations back  could  have  remained  undiscovered  in  a 
room  such  as  that,  so  modern,  so  habitable!  or  that 
she  should  be  the  first  to  possess  the  skill  of  unlock- 
ing a  cabinet,  the  key  of  which  was  open  to  all ! "  x 

No  example  could  show  more  clearly  the  war  be- 
tween sensibility  and  the  sense  of  humour.  Comedy 
is  in  fact  the  chief  weapon  against  sentimentalism, 
and  the  one  against  which  sentimentalism  is  least 
likely  to  prevail.  There  is  more  than  accidental  fit- 
ness in  this  simple  fact:  that  Richardson,  the  most 
sentimental  of  all  the  great  English  writers  of  fiction, 
is  the  only  one  of  them  who  is  not  a  humourist. 
Name  them  over:     Defoe,  a  master  of  both  rough 

iNorthanger  Abbey,  Chapter  XXII. 


92  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

farce  and  droll  characterization  •  Fielding  and  Thack- 
eray, master  ironists;  Dickens,  a  supreme  creator  of 
comic  individuals — a  master  capable  indeed  of  maud- 
lin sentimentality,  but  only  in  moments  of  conspicu- 
ous lapse;  Scott,  George  Eliot,  and  Hardy,  masters 
of  regional  humour,  the  deep  unconscious  drollery  of 
peasant  folk;  Smollett,  a  dealer  in  coarse  rough  rol- 
licking fun;  Meredith,  who  looked  on  the  face  of  the 
Truly  Comic  Muse,  seen  of  few  men; — all  belong  in 
the  list,  except  Richardson  the  lugubrious.  Senti- 
mentalism  cannot  stand  in  the  presence  of  "clean 
mirth." 

Neither,  if  we  are  to  judge  by  Sterne,  can  it  stand 
in  the  presence  of  mirth  sometimes  unclean.  For  the 
invariable  process  of  Sterne,  as  I  understand  it,  is 
to  take  the  materials  of  sensibility  and  turn  them, 
by  a  subtle  infusion  of  burlesque,  into  infectious  and 
sometimes  obscene  drollery.  The  very  familiar  epi- 
sode of  Uncle  Toby  and  the  fly  is  sometimes  seriously 
quoted  as  a  piece  of  sensibility  expressive  of  the  age 
and  identifying  Sterne  with  the  Richardsonian  cult 
in  its  reduction  to  absurdity.  But  surely  with 
Sterne  it  was  a  conscious  reduction  to  absurdity: 
surely,  in  this  very  passage,  he  deliberately  bur- 
lesques, making  sensibility  poke  fun  at  itself: — 

"My  uncle  Toby  was  a  man  patient  of  injuries; — 
not  from  want  of  courage, — I  have  told  you  in  a 
former  chapter,  'that  he  was  a  man  of  courage': — 
And  will  add  here,  that  where  just  occasion  presented, 
or  called  it  forth, — I  know  no  man  under  whose  arm 
I  would  have  sooner  taken  shelter ; — nor  did  this  arise 


SENTIMENTALISM  93 

from  any  insensibility  or  obtuseness  of  his  intellec- 
tual parts; — for  he  felt  this  insult  of  my  father's 
as  feelingly  as  a  man  could  do; — but  he  was  of  a 
peaceful,  placid  nature, — no  jarring  element  in  it, — 
all  was  mixed  up  so  kindly  within  him;  my  uncle 
Toby  had  scarce  a  heart  to  retaliate  upon  a  fly. 

" — Go — says  he,  one  day  at  dinner,  to  an  over- 
grown one  which  had  buzzed  about  his  nose,  and  tor- 
mented him  cruelly  all  dinner-time, — and  which  after 
infinite  attempts,  he  had  caught  at  last,  as  it  flew  by 
him; — I'll  not  hurt  thee,  says  my  uncle  Toby,  rising 
from  his  chair,  and  going  across  the  room,  with  the 
fly  in  his  hand, — I'll  not  hurt  a  hair  of  thy  head: — 
Go,  says  he,  lifting  up  the  sash,  and  opening  his  hand 
as  he  spoke,  to  let  it  escape ; — go,  poor  devil,  get  thee 
gone,  why  should  I  hurt  thee?— This  world  surely  is 
wide  enough  to  hold  both  thee  and  me. 

"I  was  but  ten  years  old  when  this  happened:  but 
whether  it  was,  that  the  action  itself  was  more  in 
unison  to  my  nerves  at  that  age  of  pity,  which  in- 
stantly set  my  whole  frame  into  one  vibration  of 
most  pleasurable  sensation ; — or  how  far  the  manner 
and  expression  of  it  might  go  towards  it ; — or  in  what 
degree,  or  by  what  secret  magiek, — a  tone  of  voice 
and  harmony  of  movement,  attuned  by  mercy,  might 
find  a  passage  to  my  heart,  I  know  not; — this  I  know, 
that  the  lesson  of  universal  good-will  then  taught  and 
imprinted  by  my  uncle  Toby,  has  never  since  been 
worn  out  of  my  mind:  And  tho'  I  would  not  de- 
preciate what  the  study  of  the  Literce  humaniores,  at 
the  university,  have  done  for  me  in  that  respect,  or 


94  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


discredit  the  other  helps  of  an  expensive  education 
bestowed  upon  me,  both  at  home  aud  abroad  since; 
— yet  I  often  think  that  I  owe  one  half  of  my  philan- 
thropy to  that  one  accidental  impression. 

"Eir3  This  is  to  serve  for  parents  and  governors 
instead  of  a  whole  volume  upon  the  subject."  ' 

Here,  as  throughout  Tristram  Shandy  and,  for  that 
matter,  A  Sentimental  Journey,  one  sees  the  spirit  of 
comedy  as  the  great  infallible  corrective  of  hysteria, 
the  dismally  emotional  side  of  that  sentimentalism 
which  takes  itself  so  seriously.  It  needs  but  to  be 
taken  with  a  grain  of  mirth,  to  dissolve  away  into  the 
empty  pretentiousness  it  is. 


These  few  sketchy  data  will  serve  well  enough  to 
show  what  sentimentalism  is,  and  how  its  arch-enemy 
the  spirit  of  laughter  puts  it  out  of  countenance. 
Sentimentalism  is  a  solemn  spirit,  and  flourishes  only 
in  places  not  reached  by  the  light  of  mirth.  So  much 
at  least  is  clear  if  we  speak  in  terms  of  the  sharpest 
contrast  available:  that  between  the  obvious  18th 
century  sentimentalism  of  extreme  sensibility  and 
the  equally  obvious  forms  of  comedy  which  under- 
took to  destroy  it.  The  sensibility  is  as  abnormal  and 
perverted  as  the  laughter  is  hearty,  genuine,  side- 
splitting, or  gross.  One  is  like  the  odor  of  musk,  the 
other  like  the  sound  of  a  drinking  song. 

i  The  Life  and  Opinions  of  Tristram  tihandy,  Book  II,  Chap- 
ter XII. 


S  E  N  T  I  M  E  N  T  A  L  I  S  M  95 


But  there  remain  the  more  subtle  and  complicated 
manifestations  of  sentimentalism :  and  for  these,  only 
a  more  subtle  weapon  of  Comedy  will  serve.  Because 
it  fell  to  Meredith  to  create  in  English  that  subtler  in- 
strument and  its  first  triumphant  applications  in  story, 
and  because  he  made  the  first  nice  and  permanent  defi- 
nition of  such  Comedy,  our  doctrine  here  can  best  be 
reproduced  from  his  Essay  on  the  Idea  of  Comedy  and 
of  the  Uses  of  the  Comic  Spirit. 

Comedy  means  to  Meredith  the  "laughter  of  the 
mind."  "The  laughter  of  Comedy  is  impersonal  and 
unrivalled  politeness,  nearer  a  smile  [i.  e.,  than  Satire, 
which  is  "a  blow  in  the  back  or  the  face"]  ;  often  no 
more  than  a  smile.  It  laughs  through  the  mind,  for 
the  mind  directs  it ;  and  it  might  be  called  the  humour 
of  the  mind."  Meredith  draws  his  distinctions  with 
the  greatest  possible  nicety  among  Satire,  Irony,  Hu- 
mour, and  Comedy — overlapping  elements,  of  course, 
but  differently  centred.  And  of  Comedy  he  makes 
two  most  important  generalizations : — 

First,  it  is  inherently  and  essentially  social.  "The 
Comic  poet  is  in  the  narrow  field,  or  enclosed  square, 
of  the  society  he  depicts;  and  he  addresses  the  still 
narrower  enclosure  of  men's  intellects,  with  reference 
to  the  operation  of  the  social  world  upon  their  char- 
acters. He  is  not  concerned  with  beginnings  or  end- 
ings or  surroundings,  but  with  what  you  are  now 
weaving.  To  understand  his  work  and  value  it,  you 
must  have  a  sober  liking  of  your  own  kind  and  a  sober 
estimate  of  our  civilized  qualities."  One  remembers 
at  this  point  that  the  self -righteousness,  the  vanity,  the 


96  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

hypocrisy,  and  the  frivolous  optimism  which  I  named 
as  belonging  in  the  calendar  of  sentimentalism,  are 
all  intensely  egoistic  or  anti-social  failings.  Thus  this 
Comedy  of  Meredith  is  just  the  heaven-inspired 
scourge  for  them. 

Second,  since  Comedy  is  a  social  implement,  it  is 
practicable  only  iu  some  approximation  of  a  real  so- 
ciety. Only  the  rougher  tools  of  irony  and  satire 
will  do  where  a  society  is  struggling  into  existence, 
or  going  through  the  period  of  muddle.  "There  are 
plain  reasons  why  the  Comic  poet  is  not  a  frequent 
apparition ;  and  why  the  great  Comic  poet  remains 
without  a  fellow.  A  society  of  cultivated  men  and 
women  is  required,  wherein  ideas  are  current  and  the 
perceptions  quick,  that  he  may  be  supplied  with  mat- 
ter and  an  audience.  The  semi-barbarism  of  merely 
giddy  communities,  and  feverish  emotional  periods, 
repel  him ;  and  also  a  state  of  marked  social  inequality 
of  the  sexes ;  nor  can  he  whose  business  is  to  address 
the  mind  be  understood  where  there  is  not  a  moderate 
degree  of  intellectual  activity." 

This  second  prerequisite  of  true  Comedy,  a  real  so- 
ciety, explains  several  traits  in  the  Meredith  who  form- 
ulates it.  It  explains,  first,  his  tendency  toward  femi- 
nism, his  faith  in  the  illimitable  capacity  of  woman  to 
take  her  place  as  equal  of  the  greatest — a  belief  which 
he  constantly  enforces  in  his  novels  by  showing  the 
triumph  of  noble  womanhood  over  what  is  weakest, 
most  sentimental  in  man.  "Where  the  veil  is  thrown 
over  women's  faces,  you  cannot  have  society,  without 
which  the  senses  are  barbarous  and  the  Comic  spirit  is 


SENTIMENTALISM  97 


driven  to  the  gutters  of  grossness  to  slake  its  thirst" 
— as,  for  example,  in  our  excellent  and  indispensable 
18th  century.  It  is  for  "cultivated  women  to  recog- 
nize that  the  Comic  Muse  is  one  of  their  best  friends. 
They  are  blind  to  their  interests  in  swelling  the  ranks 
of  the  sentimentalists." 

Also,  does  not  this  same  prerequisite  of  an  urbane 
and  matured  society  explain  the  smallness  of  Mere- 
dith's public,  and  the  more  and  more  specialized  nar- 
rowness of  the  scenes  in  which  he  elected  to  work? 
It  is  pretty  clear  from  his  general  doctrine  that  he 
had  visions  of  a  time,  perhaps  remote,  when  comedy 
should  have  become  a  national  institution,  as  accessible 
and  as  democratic  as  any  form  of  national  art  has  ever 
been;  a  time  when  the  reciprocity  of  comic  poet  and 
audience  should  become  all  that  the  most  sanguine 
imagination  could  conceive,  using  Aristophanes,  Con- 
greve,  Moliere,  and  their  several  publics  as  points  of 
departure.  We  misconceive  Meredith  entirely  if  we 
doubt  that  in  such  a  state  of  reciprocity  he  would 
have  been  most  at  home,  ideally  self-fulfilled.  His 
idea  of  creativeness  was  not  to  be  eccentric,  mannered, 
aristocratic :  it  was  to  work  in  a  democratic  tradition, 
a  school,  and  what  he  most  laments  is  the  unreadiness 
of  the  existing  public  for  a  democratic  tradition  that 
should  be  at  the  same  time  fine,  stimulating,  and  brac- 
ing as  well  as  democratic.  As  it  was,  the  conditions 
gave  him  neither  the  society  for  audience  nor  the  so- 
ciety for  subject.  He  believed  sufficiently  in  his  vi- 
sion to  write  for  the  few  readers  who  had  something  of 
his  own  comic  intuition — not  because  he  prized  his 


98  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

own  rarity,  but  because  he  wanted  to  help  leaven  the 
whole  mass.  He  wrote  about  the  few  small  social 
groups  which  met  his  definition  of  real  intercourse,  not 
because  he  wanted  to  idealize  an  aristocracy,  but 
because  he  wanted  to  democratize  an  ideal.  Presently 
he  realized,  at  first  with  dismay,  the  smallness  of  his 
public.  It  was  then  that  his  style  became  so  special- 
ized :  only  a  few  could  follow  him,  but  those  few  could 
follow  him  anywhere,  and  he  saw  it  as  his  peculiar 
office  to  do  the  most  that  he  could  for  them.  Better 
the  success  of  perfect  intimacy  with  a  few  than  the 
flat  failure  to  win  the  many — as  he  could  only  have 
done  by  setting  the  clock  of  social  evolution  far 
ahead,  farther  than  any  one  man  can,  even  a  major 
prophet.  If  Meredith  had  not  chosen  the  fullest  pos- 
sible possession  of  his  own  public,  he  would  probably 
have  fallen  between  two  publics,  missing  both.  His 
actual  choice  is  what  he  tacitly  expresses  to  us  as  we 
see  him  moving  most  often  in  the  restricted  area  of  a 
single  ancient  house,  a  single  aristocratic  family  and 
its  connections,  choosing  a  background  so  remote  and 
personse  so  specially  bred  that  our  own  democratic 
experience  may  fail  to  furnish  their  counterparts. 

These  points  are  worth  jotting  here,  against  the 
popular  conception  of  Meredith  as  one  who  framed  a 
cult  of  exclusiveness  for  an  aesthetic  inner  circle.  He 
believes  in  Comedy  as  democratizer  and  sweetener  of 
civilization ;  but  finding  no  audience  and,  on  the  nec- 
essary democratic  scale,  no  subject,  he  turns  where  he 
can.  This  resignation  he  saw  as  his  personal  part, 
the  only  one  possible  to  him,  toward  the  fulfilment  of 


SENTIMENTALISM  99 


his  ideal  in  the  future.  He  is  never  more  truly  him- 
self, more  Meredithian,  than  when  he  says :  "I  think 
that  all  right  use  of  life,  and  the  one  secret  of  life,  is 
to  pave  ways  for  the  firmer  footing  of  those  who  suc- 
ceed us;  as  to  my  works,  I  know  them  faulty,  think 
them  of  worth  only  when  they  point  and  aid  to  that 
end."1 

1T0  G.  P.  Baker.  Pp.  398-09,  Vol.  29,  Works  of  George 
Meredith,  Memorial  Edition.  New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons.     1909-12. 


IV 


DIDACTICISM 


In  nearly  everything  said  thus  far  about  the  nature 
of  fiction  and  of  the  criteria  by  which  we  should  judge 
it,  it  is  assumed  that  all  great  and  good  fiction  has  a 
purpose,  and  that  that  purpose  is  the  impersonal  and 
disinterested  expression  of  imaginative  insight  into 
human  nature  and  life.  It  appeared,  or  seemed  to, 
that  romance  and  realism  are  simply  different  ways  of 
getting  at  this  central  thing,  and  that  the  differences 
between  them  are  of  means  rather  than  of  meaning,  of 
process  rather  than  of  purpose.  From  the  perception 
of  this  relation,  we  fell  to  considering  one  of  the  prin- 
cipal obstacles  to  the  impersonal  and  disinterested 
expression  of  truth:  the  feeling  which  we  call  "senti- 
mentalism,"  an  egotistical  and  interested  spirit  that 
will  not  have  truth  on  truth's  own  arduous  and  aus- 
tere terms,  but  is  always  pampering  itself  with 
thought  of  the  rewards  of  truth,  or  of  the  superiority 
conferred  by  the  possession  of  truth,  or  of  the  obnox- 
iousness  of  truth  which  it  happens  to  dislike.  Against 
this  enemy  of  unselfish  truth  there  is,  we  saw,  one 
spirit  which  is  sure  to  prevail:  the  spirit  of  Chaucer 
and  Rabelais,  of  Shakspere  and  Moliere,  of  Jane  Aus- 
ten, of  Fielding,  of  Meredith — the  sweetening  and 
chastening  influence  of  Comedy. 

We  come  now  to  a  second  and  on  the  whole  less 
formidable  enemy  of  disinterested  truth.    We  as  a 

103 


104  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

generation  of  readers  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  novel  at  its  best  cannot  be  primarily  a  display  of 
the  author's  personal  emotions,  the  reactions  of  his 
own  sensibility ;  and  we  have  as  certainly  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  neither  can  it  be  primarily  a  display 
of  his  private  opinions,  his  ethical  sense  striking  atti- 
tudes in  the  presence  of  his  subject-matter.  In  short, 
there  has  grown  up  among  us  a  feeling  amounting  to 
conviction,  and  nearly  always  assumed  by  critics  as  a 
truism,  that  the  novelist  must  not  preach  to  us.  Be- 
tween the  spirit  that  sentimentalizes  and  the  spirit 
that  preaches,  there  may  be  and  often  is  a  kinship. 
Some  examples  already  named  in  speaking  of  senti- 
mentalism—  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  All  Sorts  and  Condi- 
tions of  Men,  the  juvenile  fiction  of  "Oliver  Optic" — 
are  not  only  sentimental  fiction,  they  are  sentimental 
pulpiteering.  They  might  equally  well  have  been 
saved  for  illustration  of  this  second  enemy  of  sound 
worth  in  fiction:  the  pulpiteering  spirit,  or  didacti- 
cism. 

Our  temperamental  objection  to  this  particular 
breach  of  artistic  discipline  seems  to  us  deeply 
grounded,  and  so  much  a  part  of  the  nature  of  artistic 
strategy  that  we  are  prone  to  assume  our  Tightness 
without  argument  or  investigation.  We  readily  take 
for  granted,  unless  we  have  some  reading,  that  the  pre- 
ceptorial tone  could  never  have  been  a  very  reputable 
element  in  fiction,  or  have  seemed  palatable  to  any 
great  fraction  of  even  the  most  naive  generation  of 
readers.  But  does  this  assumption  tally  with  the  fact  ? 
Enphues  and  His  England,  which  set  a  record  of 


DIDACTICISM  105 

progress  in  fiction  for  its  own  day,  is  practically  a 
manual  of  polite  usage,  a  discussion  of  social  and 
moral  codes;  the  ethical  strain  is  one  of  the  most 
prominent  elements  of  Sidney's  Arcadia  (his  Pamela, 
by  the  way,  gives  all  of  her  name  but  its  accent  to 
Richardson's  Pamela)  ;  and,  as  everybody  knows, 
Richardson  conceived  Pamela  in  the  process  of  creat- 
ing a  sort  of  manual  of  letter-writing,  a  book  of  mod- 
els of  polite  sentimental  correspondence  for  the  un- 
tutored. From  Lyly  to  the  early  19th  century 
in  England,  and  from  the  middle  17th  century 
to  the  middle  19th  in  America,  the  moral  story,  or 
novel  written  as  practical  advice  and  guide  to  con- 
duct, was  exceedingly  popular.  It  is  still  not  a  rare 
genre  in  Sunday  School  libraries.  The  Aretina  of 
Sir  George  Mackenzie,  that  most  exquisite  example  of 
the  effete  "heroic  romance,"  was  written  on  this 
theory,  quoted  with  intense  relish  by  Sir  Walter  Ra- 
leigh in  his  admirable  little  book  The  English  Novel: 
"Albeit  Essays  be  the  choicest  pearls  in  the  jewel 
house  of  Moral  Philosophy,  yet  I  ever  thought  that 
they  were  set  off  to  the  best  advantage,  and  appeared 
with  the  greatest  lustre,  when  they  were  laced  upon  a 
Romance."  And  the  youthful  essayist  follows  his 
own  prescription  by  interspersing  his  tale  with  Eu- 
phuistic  moralizing  essays.  Note  how  matter-of- 
course  is  his  assumption,  the  very  opposite  of  ours, 
that  the  only  tenable  purpose  of  fiction,  its  one  pre- 
sentable self-justification,  is  its  service  as  engine  of 
"Moral  Philosophy." 

There  were  many  decades  when  all  the  licentious- 


106  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

ness  in  fiction  masqueraded  as  moral  instruction  by 
horrible  example.  The  novel  could  allow  itself  the 
most  excessive  licence  in  portrayal  of  vice  and  scandal, 
so  long  as  it  included  the  sanctimonious  rebuke  of  evil- 
doing.  The  work  of  Aphra  Behn,  Mrs.  Eliza  Hay- 
wood, and  the  once  notorious  Mrs.  Mary  de  la  Riviere 
Mauley  survived,  at  least  for  a  time,  the  disapproval  of 
good  taste  largely  by  virtue  of  its  factitious  and  hypo- 
critical acceptance  of  the  popular  moral  judgment. 
It  is  sometimes  hard  for  us  to  remember  that  the  novel 
as  we  like  it  to  be  has  had  only  a  little  more  than  a 
generation  of  unchallenged  respectability;  indeed 
there  are  those  still  living  who  count  it  an  insidious 
agency  of  the  world,  the  flesh,  and  the  devil.  Before 
that  very  recent  attainment  of  repute,  the  novel  was 
prone  to  purchase  any  cheapest  sanction,  if  only 
that  it  might  succeed  in  the  struggle  to  survive  at  all ; 
and  no  sanction  could  be  more  inexpensive,  or  more 
certain  to  undermine  objection  on  moral  grounds,  than 
that  of  the  commonly  received  theology,  the  popular 
ethics.  The  novelist  circumvents  the  hostility  of  the 
pulpit  by  making  his  novel  a  sermon. 

The  existence  of  the  former  prejudice,  and  the 
anxiety  of  even  the  most  innocent  teller  of  tales  to 
protect  himself  from  the  suspicion  of  having  taught 
no  moral  lesson,  may  be  illustrated  by  the  Preface  of 
Alonzo  and  Melissa:  or  The  Unfeeling  Father,  an 
"American  tale"  signed  "Daniel  Jackson,  Jr.,"  and 
published  at  Exeter  in  1831.  I  quote  the  whole  Pref- 
ace :  if  its  general  quaintness  fail  to  please,  none  can 
resist  one  long  and  strangely  inconclusive  sentence 


DIDACTICISM  107 

which  suggests  that  even  in  1831  the  incorrigible  type- 
setter was  a  sore  trial  to  helpless  authorship. — 

' '  Whether  the  story  of  Alonzo  and  Melissa  will  gen- 
erally please,  the  writer  knows  not ;  if,  however,  he  is 
not  mistaken,  it  is  not  unfriendly  to  religion  and  vir- 
tue.— One  thing  was  aimed  to  be  shown,  that  a  firm 
reliance  on  Providence,  however  the  affections  might 
be  at  war  with  its  dispensations,  is  the  only  source  of 
consolation  in  the  gloomy  hours  of  affliction ;  and  that 
generally  such  dependence,  though  crossed  by  difficul- 
ties and  perplexities,  will  be  crowned  with  victory  at 
last. 

"It  is  also  believed  that  the  story  contains  no  inde- 
corous stimulants ;  nor  is  it  filled  with  unmeaning  and 
inexplicated  incidents  sounding  upon  the  sense,  but 
imperceptible  to  the  understanding.  When  anxie- 
ties '  have  been  excited  by  involved  and  doubtful 
events,  they  are  afterwards  elucidated  by  the  conse- 
quences. 

"The  writer  believes  that  generally  he  has  copied 
nature.  In  the  ardent  prospects  raised  in  youthful 
bosoms,  the  almost  consummation  of  their  wishes,  their 
sudden  and  unexpected  disappointment,  the  sorrows 
of  separation,  the  joyous  and  unlooked  for  meeting — 
in  the  poignant  feelings  of  Alonzo,  when  at  the  grave 
of  Melissa,  he  poured  the  feelings  of  his  anguished 
soul  over  her  niniature  [sic]  by  the  'moon's  pale  ray;' 
— when  Melissa,  sinking  on  her  knees  before  her  fa- 
ther, was  received  to  his  bosom  as  a  beloved  daughter 
risen  from  the  dead. 

"If  these  scenes  are  not  imperfectly  drawn,  they 


108  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

will  not  fail  to  interest  the  refined  sensibilities  of  the 
reader." 

Nor  was  it  only  in  the  ' '  unofficial  sentimentalism, ' ' 
the  outlaw  fiction  of  the  underworld  of  letters,  that 
the  moral  purport  of  art  became  a  very  momentous  arid 
pressing  problem.  Dr.  Johnson,  of  whose  official 
status  there  could  certainly  be  no  question,  worried 
himself,  in  what  seems  to  us  a  most  naive  and  archaic 
way,  over  the  morality  of  Shakspere.  Shakspere,  says 
Johnson  in  the  introduction  to  his  edition  of  the  plays, 
"sacrifices  virtue  to  convenience,"  and  is  "more  care- 
ful to  please  than  to  instruct."  Not  only  does  he 
make  "no  just  distribution  of  good  or  evil,"  but  he  is 
not  "always  careful  to  show  in  the  virtuous  a  disap- 
probation of  the  wicked."  It  is  quite  clear  that  Dr. 
Johnson  would  have  considered  Othello  a  more  moral 
play  if  Othello  had  been  made  to  upbraid  lago  in 
sanctimonious  platitudes.  When  Johnson  says  that 
Shakspere  "carries  his  persons  indifferently  through 
right  and  wrong" — that  is,  tells  the  truth  of  life — 
"and,  at  the  close,  dismisses  them  without  further 
care,  and  leaves  their  example  to  operate  by  chance," 
he  utters  what  is  from  the  modern  angle  the  ultimate 
praise  of  Shakspere 's  objectivity,  but  what  is,  from 
his  entirely  typical  18th  century  point  of  view,  the 
gravest  censure  of  a  defect  which  "the  barbarity  of 
the  age  cannot  extenuate;  for  it  is  always  a  writer's 
duty  to  make  the  world  better,  and  justice  is  a  virtue 
independent  on  time  and  place." 

From  such  representative  data  it  clearly  transpires, 
and  is  indeed  the  fact,  that  throughout  most  of  the 


D  I  D  A  C  T  I  C  I  SM  109 

history  of  modern  fiction  the  novelist's  relation  to  the 
preacher  has  been  a  most  real  problem,  with  the  ten- 
dency all  for  valuing  the  story-teller  in  proportion  as 
he  is  homilist  and  sermonizer.  Judged  as  a  mere  mat- 
ter of  aesthetic  taste,  our  modern  predilection  may  be 
simply  another  of  the  shifting  fashions  of  art,  a  swing 
of  the  pendulum.  By  the  mere  counting  of  heads, 
either  among  novelists  since  Defoe  or  among  their 
readers,  we  should  undoubtedly  find  our  objection  to 
didacticism  overruled ;  and  indeed  there  is  nothing  in 
actual  history  to  tell  us  that  we  are  right,  or  that  the 
great  novelists  of  the  future  may  not  transmit  their 
meaning  or  message  to  us  in  a  gospel  of  practical  con- 
duct, with  the  strongest  emphasis  on  what  we  ought  to 
do  and  why  we  ought  to  do  it. 


II 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  nothing  to  confine  us  to 
the  purely  historical  counting  of  heads. 

Perhaps  this  is  as  fitting  a  context  as  any  for  the 
declaration  of  a  personal  faith  that  the  novel  as  a  form 
and  as  a  possibility,  regardless  of  any  individual  nov- 
elist and  his  achievement,  is  always  becoming  better. 
It  is  always  learning  from  itself,  its  successes  and  its 
failures ;  it  is  always  learning  something  too,  in  a  less 
important  way,  from  its  critics  formal  and  informal ; 
and  as  a  person  is  said  to  "better  his  condition"  by 
marrying  above  his  class,  so  the  novel  is  always  better- 
ing its  condition  by  marriage  with  new  and  important 


110  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

ideas.  We  may  have  no  Dickens,  no  individual  crea- 
tive genius  of  the  first  order,  but  if  we  did  have  one 
he  would  write  better  novels  than  Dickens  wrote.  It 
is  possible  to-day  for  a  very  inferior  novelist  to  com- 
pose novels  better  than  those  of  Dickens  in  every  way 
that  acquired  knowledge  and  intelligent  workmanship 
control;  indeed  it  would  be  difficult  for  him  not  to 
write  novels  better  in  such  ways  than  Dickens's. 
There  is  an  elemental  gift  of  creativeness,  and  it  is 
more  important  than  anything  else ;  but  this  is  not 
to  say  that  nothing  else  is  important — and  that  ele- 
mental gift  may  be  hampered  and  curtailed  by  tempo- 
rary conditions  of  various  sorts.  The  number  of  such 
impeding  conditions  grows,  I  think,  constantly  less  as 
the  novel  learns  its  lessons  of  form  and  taste ;  genius, 
supposing  it  to  occur,  has  more  and  more  certainty  of 
getting  itself  fulfilled. 

So  the  lesson  of  history  is  not  just  that  what  has 
happened  may  happen  again.  The  very  fact  that  a 
thing  has  happened  in  an  organic  evolution,  like  that 
of  a  form  of  art,  is  almost  the  strongest  guarantee 
against  its  happening  again;  or,  if  it  happen  again, 
against  its  regaining  the  elder  prestige.  How  pallid, 
spurious,  and  altogether  inadequate  seems,  for  ex- 
ample, after  even  this  brief  time,  the  fin  de  siecle  at- 
tempt by  Stevenson  and  his  popular  imitators  to  re- 
vive the  costume  romance  of  Scott!  And  if  we  find 
history  giving  a  sort  of  sanction  to  didactic  elements 
in  the  novel,  such  elements  as  our  intuition  abhors,  we 
need  only  reflect  that  perhaps  the  change  was  a  real 
growth ;  in  a  word,  that  our  intuition  is  fundamentally 


DIDACTICISM  111 

right,  and  that  the  history  of  fiction  in  prose  is  only  a 
series  of  gropings  toward  an  ideal  which  is  at  last 
found,  or  approximated.  Especially  shall  we  be  safe 
in  deploring  the  didactic  fashion  if  we  find  our  pres- 
ent bias  supported  by  a  variety  of  considerations  more 
fundamental  than  even  the  majority  vote  of  history — 
considerations  in  reason,  in  logic,  in  the  whole  ration- 
ale of  taste. 

When  we  approach  the  question  non-historically, 
we  find  a  decisive  argument  against  the  didactic  em- 
ployment of  fiction  in  one  simple  fact,  still  too  often 
overlooked :  the  fact  that  the  novelist  creates  his  evi- 
dence, his  characters  and  scenes  and  situations,  his 
story,  and  that  they  are  infinitely  more  his  than  his 
opinions  are.  Nothing  about  life  can  be  proved  by 
imagined  evidence,  simply  because  anything  about 
life  can  be  proved  by  it.  It  is  a  truism  of  logic  that 
nothing  can  be  proved  by  an  analogy,  because  an 
analogy  can  be  found  in  fact  that  seems  to  prove  any 
proposition.  How  much  more,  then,  is  the  principle 
true  of  fiction,  which  is  free  to  manufacture  even  its 
analogy.  You  can  write  a  story  to  prove  that  slavery 
is  an  inhuman  institution  or  that  it  is  a  humane  insti- 
tution ;  you  can  write  a  novel  against  monogamy, 
and  another  one  equally  persuasive  against  polygamy 
or  polyandry  or  free  love.  Didactic  novels  are  always 
concerned  to  prove  something:  that  one  course  of 
conduct  is  right  and  the  alternative  course  wrong,  that 
one  vice  is  less  vicious  than  another  or  one  virtue  more 
virtuous  than  another,  that  some  particular  thing 
ought  to  be  done  or  not  done,  that  this  or  that  problem 


112  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

should  be  solved  thus  and  so,  and  no  otherwise.  But 
the  didactic  novel  is  always  a  self-destroying  victim 
to  this  betraying  fact:  that  it  was  created  expressly 
to  prove  its  chosen  didactic  point,  and,  being  so 
created,  can  prove  nothing  except  the  existence  of 
its  own  purpose — that  is,  its  author's  private  view  of 
something.  You  cannot  get  behind  or  around  this 
fact.  It  is  one  of  the  few  non-debatable  things — not 
because,  like  a  matter  of  taste,  it  admits  of  differences 
outside  reason,  but  because,  being  purely  a  matter 
of  reason,  it  admits  of  no  differences  at  all.  The 
didactic  novelist's  imagined  evidence  is  at  most  simply 
one  vote  for  one  opinion ;  and  on  a  point  open  to  con- 
troversy no  opinion  is  worth  anything  unless  it  results 
from  all  the  votes  for  that  opinion  balanced  against 
all  the  votes  for  all  the  other  possible  opinions. 

Even  if  we  were  to  take  the  novelist's  evidence  as 
unquestioned  actual  fact  instead  of  fancy,  it  would 
fail,  then,  to  do  more  than  illustrate  an  opinion  by  a 
more  or  less  apt  analogue.  Of  the  difficulty  of  can- 
celling out  all  the  factors  in  any  given  human  prob- 
lem of  justice  so  as  to  get  an  ultimate  and  valid  solu- 
tion, John  Stuart  Mill  has  this  to  say : 

"To  take  another  example  from  a  subject  already 
once  referred  to.  In  a  co-operative  industrial  associa- 
tion, is  it  just  or  not  that  talent  or  skill  should  give  a 
title  to  superior  remuneration?  On  the  negative  side 
of  the  question  it  is  argued,  that  whoever  does  the  best 
he  can  deserves  equally  well,  and  ought  not  in  justice 
to  be  put  in  a  position  of  inferiority  for  no  fault  of 
his  own;  that  superior  abilities  have  already  advan- 


DIDACTICISM  113 

tages  more  than  enough,  in  the  admiration  they  excite, 
the  personal  influence  they  command,  and  the  internal 
sources  of  satisfaction  attending  them,  without  adding 
to  these  a  superior  share  of  the  world's  goods;  and 
that  society  is  bound  in  justice  rather  to  make  com- 
pensation to  the  less  favoured,  for  this  unmerited  in- 
equality of  advantages,  than  to  aggravate  it.  On  the 
contrary  side  it  is  contended,  that  society  receives  more 
from  the  more  efficient  labourer ;  that,  his  services  be- 
ing more  useful,  society  owes  him  a  larger  return  for 
them;  that  a  greater  share  of  the  joint  result  is  actu- 
ally his  work,  and  not  to  allow  his  claim  to  it  is  a  kind 
of  robbery;  that,  if  he  is  only  to  receive  as  much  as 
others,  he  can  only  be  justly  required  to  produce  as 
much,  and  to  give  a  smaller  amount  of  time  and  exer- 
tion, proportioned  to  his  superior  efficiency.  Who 
shall  decide  between  these  appeals  to  conflicting  prin- 
ciples of  justice?  Justice  has  in  this  case  two  sides 
to  it,  which  it  is  impossible  to  bring  into  harmony; 
and  the  two  disputants  have  chosen  opposite  sides: 
the  one  looks  to  what  it  is  just  that  the  individual 
should  receive;  the  other,  to  what  it  is  just  that  the 
community  should  give.  Each,  from  his  own  point  of 
view,  is  unanswerable;  and  any  choice  between  them, 
on  grounds  of  justice,  must  be  perfectly  arbitrary. 
Social  utility  alone  can  decide  the  preference. ' ' 1 

When,  in  ordinary  practical  living,  the  sum  of  wis- 
dom can  go  no  farther  than  to  find  what  it  seems  best 

i  From  the  Essay  on  Liberty.  Utilitarianism,  Liberty,  and 
Representative  Government.  New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 
(Everyman's  Library.) 


114  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

to  do  in  the  present  given  conditions,  how  presump- 
tuous and  how  hollow  it  is  for  the  novelist  to  pretend 
that  he  has  found  a  law  which  is  universally  true,  a 
precept  which  will  lead  no  one  into  error !  How  vain 
and,  in  the  last  analysis,  how  silly  to  expect  a  fabri- 
cation of  the  inventive  faculty  to  do  for  all  mankind 
that  which  the  best  conscience  of  the  individual  man 
can  hardly  achieve  for  that  one  person,  when  he  has  all 
the  terms  of  his  problem  spread  out  tangibly  and 
visibly  before  him !  Looked  at  in  this  light,  the  novel 
which  undertakes  to  tell  us  how  to  live — whom  to 
marry,  how  to  spend  our  money,  how  to  choose  our 
occupation,  what  God  to  believe  in — seems  at  best  a 
poor  and  shabby  pretence,  a  well-meant  insult  to  the 
intelligence,  as  the  greater  part  of  human  advice  in 
general  proverbially  is. 


Ill 


No:  it  is  not  the  novelist's  province  to  recommend 
special  points  or  types  of  conduct  to  us,  or  to  instruct 
us  how  to  take  sides  in  great  partisan  issues.  It  is 
his  business  to  show  us  what  tilings  are  and  how  they 
work,  when  looked  at  in  the  light  of  a  humanely 
searching  comprehension.  The  great  issues  that  he 
tests,  he  test's  in  terms  of  action ;  for  actions,  with  their 
results,  are  his  crucible  for  ideas.  He  may  indeed 
treat  certain  ideals  and  notions  of  obligation  in  con- 
duct: but  only  as  things  that  exist,  as  the  forces  be- 
hind character  and  action,  as  things  that  have,  for 


DIDACTICISM  115 

his  chosen  characters  in  their  given  set  of  conditions, 
certain  results.  He  is  not  a  special  pleader  for  any- 
thing. 

In  these  days  when  novels,  as  men,  are  popularly 
measured  by  their  loyalties  and  their  rancours,  most 
novels  written  about  the  international  situation  take 
sides  heatedly.  They  are  interested  in  scientific  or- 
ganization when  that  scientific  organization  is  German, 
or  in  heroism  when  that  heroism  is  French,  in  the 
struggle  for  national  solidarity  when  that  struggle  is 
British  or  American ;  and  especially  they  are  interested 
in  the  moral  culpability  of  the  enemy.  The  novelist 
is  not  to  be  despised  as  a  man  when  he  takes  sides  in 
such  great  issues ;  indeed,  we  as  men  should  have  to 
despise  him  if  he  did  not.  But  as  a  novelist  he  has 
in  the  long  run  more  to  lose  by  confining  himself  to 
one  side  of  a  sharp  issue  than  he  can  possibly  gain  by 
it.  He  may  be  doing  the  only  thing  possible  to  him  in 
the  circumstances ;  but  that  only  proves  that  the  con- 
science of  life  is  sometimes  a  more  instant  and  over- 
mastering thing  than  the  conscience  of  art,  which  is 
patient,  far-seeing,  and  more  willing  to  wait  for  certi- 
fied truth  than  to  act  on  even  a  noble  impulse.  The 
best  novels  about  the  great  war  have  been  written 
about  its  effects  on  typical  individuals  or  communi- 
ties, by  writers  who  seem  to  be  saying:  "Here  is 
what  war  is  and  does  in  the  lives  of  a  certain  few  per- 
sons chosen  because  they  are  like  thousands  of  others, 
only  perhaps  more  interesting."  And  we  know  that 
the  great  war  novels  of  the  future  must  be  about  war 
itself,  its  heroism  and  cowardice,  its  justices  and  in- 


116  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


justices,  its  splendour  and  its  horror.  Those  great 
novels  will  deal  with  things  which  are  seen  of  all  men 
as  humanly  important,  wherever  and  by  whomever 
exhibited,  as  truly  after  as  before  all  the  present  prob- 
lems are  solved  and  superseded.  The  only  spirit 
which  has  any  chance  of  making  itself  felt  in  enduring 
art  is  that  open-minded  spirit  revealed  by  an  Ameri- 
can man  of  letters,  himself  one  of  the  most  valiant 
fighters  in  our  Civil  War,  when,  long  years  after  the 
struggle  which  had  both  given  and  cost  him  so  much, 
he  wrote : 

"I  know  what  uniform  I  wore — 

0,  that  I  knew  which  side  I  fought  for !"  1 

When  we  take  this  austere  view  of  the  artist's  de- 
tachment from  the  press  of  immediate  practical  is- 
sues, on  whatever  scale  propounded,  we  see  not  only 
that  it  is  impossible  for  his  manufactured  evidence  to 
prove  the  rightness  of  this  or  that  course  of  conduct, 
but  that  if  it  were  possible  it  would  still  be  undesir- 
able. He  has  a  greater  thing  to  do ;  and  his  only  hope 
of  being  practically  useful  in  the  long  run  lies  in  his 
doing  it  without  fear  or  favour — especially  without 
fear  of  the  consequences  if  he  renounce  the  popular  ex- 
pediency of  the  passing  moment,  and  without  favour 
of  one  character  against  another  because  of  either 's 
theories  of  conduct. 

Some  famous  words  of  Matthew  Arnold  serve  to  re- 
mind us  of  what  disaster  to  truth  follows  the  writer 's 

i  The  Hesitating  Veteran  in  Shapes  of  Clay.  By  Ambrose 
Bierce.  New  York  and  Washington:  The  Neale  Publishing  Co, 
1910. 


DIDACTICISM  117 

dedication  of  himself  to  a  partisan  bias,  or  to  any  one 
of  the  various  self-interests  of  creed  and  class.  Those 
words  were  written,  to  be  sure,  to  preach  a  high  ideal 
of  criticism ;  but  if  they  apply  to  criticism,  in  one 
sense  a  secondary  and  derived  art,  how  much  more 
emphatically  must  they  apply  to  literature  of  the 
primary  and  creative  orders,  in  terms  of  which  criti- 
cism exists ! — 

"It  is  of  the  last  importance  that  English  criticism 
should  clearly  discern  what  ride  for  its  course,  in  order 
to  avail  itself  of  the  field  now  opening  to  it,  and  to 
produce  fruit  to  the  future,  it  ought  to  take.  The 
rule  may  be  summed  up  in  one  word,— disinterested- 
ness. And  how  is  criticism  to  show  disinterestedness  ? 
By  keeping  aloof  from  practice :  by  resolutely  follow- 
ing the  law  of  its  own  nature,  which  is  to  be  a  free 
play  of  the  mind  on  all  subjects  which  it  touches ;  by 
steadily  refusing  to  lend  itself  to  any  of  those  ulterior, 
political,  practical  considerations  about  ideas  which 
plenty  of  people  will  be  sure  to  attach  to  them,  which 
perhaps  ought  often  to  be  attached  to  them,  which  in 
this  country  at  any  rate  are  certain  to  be  attached  to 
them  quite  sufficiently,  but  which  criticism  has  really 
nothing  to  do  with.  Its  business  is,  as  I  have  said, 
simply  to  know  the  best  that  is  known  and  thought  in 
the  world,  and,  by  in  its  turn  making  this  known,  to 
create  a  current  of  true  and  fresh  ideas.  Its  business 
is  to  do  this  with  inflexible  honesty,  with  due  ability; 
but  its  business  is  to  do  no  more,  and  to  leave  alone  all 
questions  of  practical  consequences  and  applications, 
questions  which  will  never  fail  to  have  due  prominence 


118  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

given  to  them.  Else  criticism,  besides  being  really 
false  to  its  own  nature,  merely  continues  in  the  old 
rut  which  it  has  hitherto  followed  in  this  country,  and 
will  certainly  miss  the  chance  now  given  to  it.  For 
what  is  at  present  the  bane  of  criticism  in  this  coun- 
try? It  is  that  practical  considerations  cling  to  it  and 
stifle  it ;  it  subserves  interests  not  its  own ;  our  organs 
of  criticism  are  organs  of  men  and  parties  having  prac- 
tical ends  to  serve,  and  with  them  those  practical  ends 
are  the  first  thing,  and  the  play  of  mind  the  second;  so 
much  play  of  mind  as  is  compatible  with  the  prosecu- 
tion of  those  practical  ends  is  all  that  is  wanted.  .  .  . 
It  must  needs  be  that  men  should  act  in  sects  and 
parties,  that  each  of  these  sects  and  parties  should 
have  its  organ,  and  should  make  this  organ  subserve 
the  interests  of  its  action ;  but  it  would  be  well,  too, 
that  there  should  be  a  criticism,  not  the  minister  of 
these  interests,  not  their  enemy,  but  absolutely  and 
entirely  independent  of  them.  No  other  criticism  will 
ever  attain  any  real  authority  or  make  any  real  way 
towards  its  end, — the  creating  a  current  of  true  and 
fresh  ideas. 

"It  is  because  criticism  has  so  little  kept  in  the  pure 
intellectual  sphere,  has  so  little  detached  itself  from 
practice,  has  been  so  directly  polemical  and  controver- 
sial, that  it  has  so  ill  accomplished,  in  this  country, 
its  best  spiritual  work ;  which  is  to  keep  man  from  a 
self-satisfaction  which  is  retarding  and  vulgarizing,  to 
lead  him  towards  perfection,  by  making  his  mind 
dwell  upon  what  is  excellent  in  itself,  and  the  absolute 
beauty  and  fitness  of  things.     A  polemical  practical 


DIDACTICISM  119 

criticism  makes  men  blind  even  to  the  ideal  imperfec- 
tion of  their  practice,  makes  them  willingly  assert  its 
ideal  perfection,  in  order  the  better  to  secure  it 
against  attack;  and  clearly  this  is  narrowing  and 
baneful  for  them.  If  they  were  reassured  on  the  prac- 
tical side,  speculative  considerations  of  ideal  perfec- 
tion they  might  be  brought  to  entertain,  and  their 
spiritual  horizon  would  thus  gradually  widen.  .  .  . 

"It  will  be  said  that  it  is  a  very  subtle  and  indirect 
action  which  I  am  thus  prescribing  for  criticism,  and 
that,  by  embracing  in  this  manner  the  Indian  virtue 
of  detachment  and  abandoning  the  sphere  of  practical 
life,  it  condemns  itself  to  a  slow  and  obscure  work. 
Slow  and  obscure  it  may  be,  but  it  is  the  only  proper 
work  of  criticism.  The  mass  of  mankind  will  never 
have  any  ardent  zeal  for  seeing  things  as  they  are; 
very  inadequate  ideas  will  always  satisfy  them.  On 
these  inadequate  ideas  reposes,  and  must  repose,  the 
general  practice  of  the  world.  That  is  as  much  as 
saying  that  whoever  sets  himself  to  see  things  as  they 
are  will  find  himself  one  of  a  very  small  circle;  but 
it  is  only  by  this  small  circle  resolutely  doing  its  own 
work  that  adequate  ideas  will  ever  get  current  at  all. 
The  rush  and  roar  of  practical  life  will  always  have 
a  dizzying  and  attracting  effect  upon  the  most  col- 
lected spectator,  and  tend  to  draw  him  into  its  vortex ; 
most  of  all  will  this  be  the  case  where  that  life  is  so 
powerful  as  it  is  in  England.  But  it  is  only  by  re- 
maining collected,  and  refusing  to  lend  himself  to  the 
point  of  view  of  the  practical  man,  that  the  critic  can 
do  the  practical  man  any  service;  and  it  is  only  by  the 


120  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

greatest  sincerity  in  pursuing  his  own  course,  and  by 
at  last  convincing  even  the  practical  man  of  his  sin- 
cerity, that  he  can  escape  misunderstandings  which 
perpetually  threaten  him."1 

Substitute,  here,  "fiction"  and  "novelist"  for  "crit- 
icism" and  "critic,"  and  "English-speaking  coun- 
tries" for  "England,"  and  Arnold  serves  our  purpose 
not  less  well  than  he  did  his  own.  The  passage  cited 
identifies  a  partisan  criticism,  as  I  wish  to  identify  a 
partisan  fiction,  with  the  sentimental  Pharisaism  of 
those  who  have  interests  to  serve.  From  our  two 
general  objections  to  the  partisan  fiction — first,  that  it 
is  invented  expressly  to  prove  something  and  can 
therefore  prove  nothing;  second,  that  the  novel  has  a 
greater  privilege  than  to  prove  any  controversial  point 
— it  will  be  evident  that  the  preacher  in  fiction  is  in  an 
altogether  different  category  from  that  of  the  preacher 
in  the  pulpit.  The  point  of  the  difference  is  not 
always  seen,  to  be  sure :  one  sometimes  hears  it  urged : 
"But  why  should  you  not  listen  to  the  novelist's  ser- 
mon as  well  as  to  the  preacher's?  Why  should  you 
not  let  the  novelist,  if  he  be  also  a  moralist,  lay  down 
prescriptions  of  conduct?  Why  listen  to  the  ethicist 
and  the  priest  of  religion,  and  not  to  him  ?  Is  not  the 
counsel  of  these  other  two  a  valuable  guide?"  To 
which  the  answer  is,  Only  if  they  too  be  disinterested. 
The  priest  does  not  decide  by  political  interest  whom 
he  wishes  elected,  and  then  derive  his  religious  prin- 
ciples from  his  political  interest;  the  sociologist  does 
not  divide  his  world  into  those  whom  it  would  profit 

i  The  Function  of  Criticism  at  the  Present  Time. 


DIDACTICISM  121 

him  to  put  into  office  and  those  whom  it  would  profit 
him  to  put  into  jail,  and  then  frame  his  prescription 
for  society  accordingly.  At  least,  if  he  did  we  should 
do  very  well  to  distrust  him  also.  Neither  properly 
chooses  his  evidence  to  demonstrate  a  point :  the  point 
is  considered  as  existing  elsewhere  and  independently, 
for  the  one  as  part  of  a  law  which  altereth  not,  for 
the  other  in  the  nature  of  society  as  it  is  constituted. 
It  is  obvious  that  the  partisan  novelist  cannot  be,  in 
this  sense,  disinterested  at  all.  Whether  he  chooses 
the  facts  and  finds  a  principle  to  embrace  them,  or 
chooses  the  principle  and  finds  the  facts  to  illustrate 
it,  he  is  serving  an  interest  other  than  that  with 
which  he  has  his  proper  concern — the  truth  of  life, 
how  things  are  and  how  they  work  together  for  good 
and  for  evil. 


IV 


It  is  the  intention  of  the  argument  thus  far,  not 
exactly  to  show  that  didactic  art  is  bad  art,  but  to 
show  that  art  is  likely  to  be  bad  in  so  far  as  it  is 
didactic — that  is,  the  didactic  element  in  it  is  a  handi- 
cap, one  more  thing  for  it  to  succeed  in  spite  of.  Art 
that  is  nothing  but  didactic  flatly  fails;  but  in  mod- 
ern conditions  it  is  wholly  unlikely  that  a  writing  man 
will  turn  to  the  novel  if  his  sole  equipment  is  a  set  of 
moral  precepts  which  he  holds  for  ultimate  truths. 
The  evangelical  novel,  despite  a  few  transient  vogues 
such  as  that  of  the  Reverend  Charles  M.  Sheldon, — 
In  His  Steps  will  serve,  for  those  who  remember  it, 


122  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

to  represent  the  whole  school, — is  pretty  nearly  de- 
funct; and  the  didactic  novel  when  its  propagandizing 
is  secular  is  always  written  by  an  author  who  has  in 
him  something,  however  obnubilated,  of  the  artist. 

That  a  novel  may  compete  with  some  success  against 
its  own  didacticism  is  shown  in  the  rather  illustrious 
history  of  protest  in  the  novel.  We  might  go  back 
and  retrace  this  from  the  indictment  of  debtors' 
prisons  in  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield;  or  we  might  begin 
with  such  protests  against  institutions  as  those  of 
Dickens  against  a  certain  type  of  private  school  in 
Nicholas  Nickleby  and  of  Reade  against  a  certain  type 
of  private  asylum  for  the  insane,  and  against  the 
laws  relating  to  insanity,  in  Hard  Cash.  But,  for  one 
sufficiently  coherent  and  centralized  illustration,  we 
need  go  no  farther  than  the  so-called  "novel  of  pro- 
test" of  the  '50 's  and  '60 's. 

The  novels  of  this  school  are  the  fictional  counter- 
part of  the  Chartist  movement.  The  protest  was 
against  the  industrial  system  of  Great  Britain — the 
exploitation  of  the  labouring  class,  absentee  landlord- 
ism, child  labour,  the  fearful  housing  conditions  of 
manufacturing  districts,  the  long  hours  and  unsani- 
tary surroundings  of  work,  merciless  competition,  and 
all  the  political  applications  of  Benthamism  and  the 
Utilitarian  philosophy  as  interpreted  by  those  who 
liked  the  liberalism  of  Mill  less  than  his  rigour ;  in 
short,  against  the  political  and  economic  facts  which, 
helped  out  by  the  lean  crops  of  famine  years,  created 
all  that  was  most  unbearable  in  the  "hungry  '40 's. " 
Fiction,  in  its  protest  against  these  facts,  sounds  often 


DIDACTICISM  123 

like  the  sincere  but  ranting,  inflammatory,  and  head- 
long utterances  of  the  most  modern  socialistic  dema- 
gogue of  a  violent  type. 

It  is  my  present  point  that  these  novels  were  saved, 
not  by  the  remedies  proposed  or  the  argument  ad- 
vanced, but  solely  by  the  amount  of  life  they  ob- 
jectively depicted  and  by  the  open-eyed  sympathy 
which  they  displayed  for  it.  Disraeli  attacked  the 
intolerable  conditions  in  his  Sybil, — also  entitled  The 
Two  Nations,  i.  e.,  the  exploiter  and  the  exploited, — 
and  he  saw  the  remedy  in  the  infusion  of  a  new  sin- 
cerity and  courage  into  the  legislative  system  of 
England.  Kingsley  attacked  them  in  Yeast  and 
Alton  Locke,  his  two  burning  indictments  of  the  agri- 
cultural labourer's  life  in  the  country  and  of  the 
artisan's  in  the  city,  and  he  saw  the  remedy  in  that 
"muscular  Christianity"  with  which  his  name  is 
commonly  joined  in  some  other  connections.  Mrs. 
Gaskell  attacked  them  in  Mary  Barton,  to  my  mind  by 
all  odds  the  most  powerful  book  and  still  one  of  the 
most  readable  books  of  this  whole  school  and  period ; 
and  the  remedy  that  she  proposed  was  simply  Chris- 
tian sympathy,  exhibited  by  the  employe  in  forgiving 
his  employer  for  wrongs  done,  and  by  the  employer 
in  so  far  unbending  as  to  see  the  common  humanity 
in  his  employe.  It  is  significant  that  Mrs.  Gaskell, 
when  she  wrote  North  and  South  a  few  years  later, 
saw  the  burden  of  guilt  as  being  somewhat  differently 
distributed,  and  blamed  the  employe  more,  the  em- 
ployer less.  The  remedy  was  still  to  understand  and 
forgive,  but  the  need  of  forgiveness  was  no  longer 


124  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


confined  to  one  side  of  the  contention.  Thus  a  great 
authoress,  somewhat  unfortunately  known  best  by  her 
most  flawless  novel,  Cranford,  and  not  by  her  most 
striking,  saw  the  impermanence  of  part  of  her  own 
didacticism,  and  made  its  insufficiency  a  matter  of 
record. 

In  all  these  stories  of  rebellious  protest,  the 
value  lies,  I  say,  not  in  the  accusations  or  the  proposed 
remedies,  but  in  the  truthful  depiction  of  what  con- 
ditions were,  and  what  they  did  to  human  men  and 
women  and  children.  The  truth  revealed  and  the 
compassion  evoked  are  enough,  in  the  best  of  these 
stories,  to  carry  the  burden  of  theories  that  pass,  solu- 
tions that  do  not  solve,  and  economic  doctrines  that 
grow  laughably  archaic. 

And  the  best  of  evangelical  fiction  shows  the  work- 
ing of  the  same  law.  We  value  the  Quo  Vadis  of  the 
lamented  Henry  Sienkiewicz,  not  as  a  piece  of  Chris- 
tian apologetics,  not  as  a  sort  of  sublimated  muck- 
raking of  paganism,  but  as  a  delineation  of  what 
Christianity  and  Christian  heroism  and  martyrdom 
were,  and  as  an  analysis  of  the  chemical  reaction  that 
necessarily  followed  when  Christianity  and  paganism 
were  bottled  up  together  in  a  part  of  the  world  too 
small  to  hold  both.  And  if  Kingsley's  Hypatia  may 
be  said  to  live  still,  it  lives  only  in  so  far  as  it  did 
for  Alexandria  what  Quo  Vadis  did  for  Rome.  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward's  Robert  Elsmere,  a  quasi-didactic 
anti-evangelical  novel,  is  still  impressive,  not  because 
it  tries  to  prove  that  the  modern  man,  if  truly 
courageous  and  thoughtful,  can  no  longer  believe  the 


DIDACTICISM  125 

literal  teachings  of  the  Church,  but  because  it  shows, 
at  once  intensely  and  typically,  the  ferment  of  some 
modern  doubts  in  the  mind  which  will  have  truth  at 
whatever  cost.  In  all  stories  of  which  the  contro- 
versial element  is  a  part,  whatever  lasting  value  there 
is  resides  in  the  authenticity  of  the  characters,  the 
importance  of  the  amount  and  kind  of  life  faithfully 
portrayed,  and  the  author's  success  in  subordinating 
his  own  crotchets  and  private  views  to  the  complex 
actualities  of  the  struggle  which  he  undertakes  to 
stage.  A  story  is  not  necessarily  bad  if  it  contain  a 
temporal  issue  didactically  resolved  and  brought  to 
some  specious  finality.  But  it  is  certainly  harder  for 
such  a  story  to  be  good.  Didacticism  is  not  the  death- 
warrant  of  a  novel,  but  it  is  assuredly  not  the  way  of 
life  for  it  either. 


On  the  whole  it  is  safe  to  say,  then,  that  didacticism 
is  essentially  an  inartistic  spirit.  It  is  among  the 
conceivable  possibilities  that  a  novel  written  primarily 
for  a  didactic  purpose  might  turn  out  to  be  a  good 
story  in  all  the  necessary  artistic  ways;  but  the  ex- 
cellence of  such  a  novel  would  be  in  the  last  degree 
accidental,  and  it  is  quite  certain  that  a  finely  conscien- 
tious artist  would  not  project  a  story  in  the  sermoniz- 
ing spirit.  There  are  trick  pictures  which  in  certain 
lights  reveal  hidden  faces  or,  inverted,  become  other 
pictures  entirely;  and  it  is  always  possible  that  one  of 
them  might  turn  out  to  be  a  good  picture.     But  a  real 


126  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


painter  is  concerned  with  something  better  than  the 
production  of  such  curiosities.  The  didactic  strain 
in  an  otherwise  good  novel  is  like  the  concealed  trick 
of  the  picture:  it  is  no  more  important  to  the  good- 
ness of  the  novel  than  the  Baconian  cryptograms,  sup- 
posing them  to  exist,  are  to  the  goodness  of  the 
Shakspere  plays.  A  moral  precept  hampers  the 
work  of  fiction ;  and  the  question  for  criticism  to  ask 
of  the  didactic  novel  is,  How  much  else  is  there  to 
offset  the  serious  fault?  The  trouble  with  the  "prob- 
lem ' '  play  or  novel,  if  the  problem  is  really  important, 
is  the  substitution  of  a  false  and  arbitrary  selective 
principle  for  the  only  valid  principle.  The  material 
is  assembled  to  prove  a  contentious  opinion,  not  to 
represent  life  by  facts  chosen  for  their  interest. 

Are  we  then  obliged,  on  these  or  similar  grounds, 
to  deny  an  allegory,  such  as  Pilgrim's  Progress,  its 
acknowledged  claim  to  a  place  among  works  of  art? 
Indeed  no :  whether  self -evidently  or  not,  this  form  is 
an  exception  to  the  general  indictment.  Didactic  it 
is,  and  partisan,  but  in  a  special  way,  and  within  a 
special  realm  of  its  own.  I  can  express  the  matter  no 
more  pointedly  than  by  saying  that  the  allegory  is 
nothing  but  didacticism.  There  is  no  other  purpose 
than  to  clothe  in  striking  and  ingenious  garb  the  moral 
precepts  in  which  the  allegory  has  its  origin.  In  other 
words,  an  allegory  is  simply  an  extended  figure  of 
speech,  a  self-propagating  metaphor;  and  the  only 
artistic  questions  it  raises  are,  first,  whether  it  is  an 
effective  expression  of  its  meaning  and,  second, 
whether  it  has  in  itself  force  and  beauty.     The  di- 


DIDACTICISM  127 

dactic  novel  pretends  to  be  doing  one  thing  while 
really  doing  something  else  that  is  incompatible  with 
the  first  thing;  it  makes  an  interested  argument  and 
offers  it  as  a  disinterested  story.  In  allegory,  the 
moral  argument  is  the  world  in  which  the  whole  work 
is  conceived,  lives,  moves,  and  has  its  being.  It  is  in 
essence  a  set  of  convictions  given  shape  as  dramatis 
persona?,  just  as  a  proper  pageant  is  tradition  or  geog- 
raphy or  history  come  alive  to  teach  us  through  the 
eye  and  the  ear.  There  is  no  clash  in  allegory  be- 
tween a  moral  purpose  and  an  ostensibly  disinter- 
ested reading  of  life,  simply  because  there  is  no  os- 
tensibly disinterested  reading  of  life. 

Are  we  then  to  fall  back  on  art  that  is  "unmoral" 
— i.e.,  without  any  moral  signification  whatever?  Is 
the  rejection  of  didacticism  the  acceptance  of  aestheti- 
cism,  art  for  art?  By  no  means.  Art  can  never  be 
"unmoral"  so  long  as  either  he  who  makes  it  or  he 
who  enjoys  remains  a  moral  being — and  whatever  art 
exists  for,  it  is  certainly  not  for  itself.  "We  are  pro- 
foundly and  eternally  right  when  we  assert  that  all 
fiction  has  some  sort  of  moral  basis,  sound  or  unsound, 
and  that,  other  things  being  equal,  the  excellence  of 
the  fiction  will  be  in  proportion  to  the  soundness  of 
its  moral  basis.  What  then  do  we  mean  by  such  state- 
ments, and  how  are  they  to  be  reconciled  with  our 
objections  to  the  fiction  which  is  preachment? 

It  is  useful  at  this  point  to  recall  our  preliminary 
distinction  between  the  novelist's  purpose  in  writing 
his  book,  and  the  meaning  we  get  out  of  that  book  after 
it  is  written.     The  novelist's  purpose,  I  asserted,  is 


128  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

reducible  always  to  a  disinterested  search  for  the  na- 
ture of  life,  what  life  is;  his  meaning,  I  may  now 
assert,  is  his  character — what  he  is.  He  may  not 
wilfully  intrude  himself  into  the  spectacle;  but  he  is 
there  none  the  less,  by  the  very  nature  of  the  relation 
between  the  creator  and  the  thing  created.  He  may 
not  have  uttered  a  single  sentiment  avowedly  his  own ; 
but  he  is  in  the  whole  composition,  the  whole  com- 
position is  in  the  truest,  most  inescapable  sense  him- 
self. Certain  characters  have  been  shown,  certain 
issues  proposed  and  fought  out  with  some  sort  of 
spiritual  or  material  triumph,  sympathies  have  been 
attracted  by  some  things  in  the  spectacle  and  repelled 
by  others — and  all  these  matters  are  the  artist's  own 
moral  choice,  his  character  objectified.  The  persons 
he  chooses  to  depict,  the  issues  that  are  in  his  eyes 
important  enough  to  be  struggled  over,  the  kind  of 
triumph  won,  the  direction  taken  by  the  reader's  sym- 
pathy, even  the  very  omissions  and  suppressions — all 
these  things  are  the  measure  of  the  novelist's  will,  of 
the  deep  unconscious  self  which  he  can  no  more  help 
expressing  than  the  phenomena  of  nature  can  help 
expressing  natural  law. 

It  is  that  deep  unconscious  self  that  must,  we  say,  be 
morally  sound.  The  reader's  sympathy  must  be  made 
to  take  right  directions ;  the  interest  must  be  drawn  to 
things  that  over-top  mere  differences  of  opinion ;  the 
set  of  values  implied  in  the  given  story  must  be  those 
to  which  the  moral  judgment  of  mankind  instinctively 
responds.  Think  what  you  will  about  property  rights, 
democracy  and  autocracy,  marriage,  slavery,  socialism, 


DIDACTICISM  129 

revealed  religion,  you  are  never  in  any  serious  doubt 
about  what  is  admirable  and  what  detestable  in  men 
and  women  so  long  as  your  self-interest  is  not  touched. 
And  you  say  that  a  novel  is  morally  sound  when  it 
makes  you  feel,  without  necessarily  bothering  to  think, 
that  the  novelist  is  a  person  who  admires  and  detests 
the  same  fundamental  things  that  everybody  else 
worth  hearing  admires  and  detests. 

We  have  heard  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson  censure  our 
English  Shakspere  for  his  objectivity:  Shakspere 
"carries  his  persons  indifferently  through  right  and 
wrong,  and,  at  the  close,  dismisses  them  without  fur- 
ther care,  and  leaves  their  example  to  operate  by 
chance."  But  does  it  operate  by  chance?  Does  it 
not  operate  about  the  same  way  on  every  one  of  us? 
Professor  Stuart  Sherman,  in  a  recent  essay,  The 
Humanism  of  Shakspere,1  points  out  that  after  all  no 
one  of  us  can  possibly  be  in  doubt  whom  of  the 
Shakspere  characters  we  were  meant  to  admire,  whom 
to  love,  whom  to  regard  indulgently  despite  their 
shortcomings,  whom  to  laugh  at,  whom  to  loathe.  The 
character  may  not  receive  justice  on  the  stage, — in 
tragedy  he  seldom  does, — -but  he  always  receives  it  in 
the  audience,  says  Professor  Sherman.  And  that  is 
the  only  moral  effect  that  counts  at  all  in  art.  The 
moral  basis  of  art  is  the  moral  consciousness  of  the 
race. 

"To  make  the  world  better"  may  be,  as  John- 
son says,  a  writer's  duty;  but  it  is  hardly  a  duty  that 

i  Reprinted  in  Main  Tendencies  in  Contemporary  Literature. 
By  Stuart  P.  Sherman.  New  York:  Henry  Holt  and  Com- 
pany. 


130  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


he  can  perform  the  better  for  being  aware  of  it.  He 
must  have  his  eye  outward  upon  the  world ;  and  if  he 
succeed  in  making  the  world  better,  it  will  be  because 
his  eye  is  such  that  he  cannot  help  seeing  the  right 
things  with  the  right  relative  values.  His  purpose 
must  be  only  the  truth.  His  moral  meaning  to  us  will 
be  exactly  what  he  is.  "Whatever  a  novel  is  or  is  not, 
it  is  inevitably  a  close  and  full  revelation  of  the  moral 
.sensibilities  of  the  man  who  wrote  it.  It  must, 
whether  he  will  it  to  or  not,  express  his  ethical  ac- 
ceptance of  life.  In  this  sense  the  most  "objective" 
piece  of  art  ever  penned  on  paper,  painted  on  canvas, 
or  carved  in  stone  is  as  subjective  as  the  most  de- 
liberately intimate  self-revelation. 


V 
SATIRE 


We  have  now  come,  I  think,  to  the  point  where  this 
argument  about  the  purpose  and  the  meaning  of 
iiction  begins  to  have  a  shape  and  a  recognizable  di- 
rection. I  have  proposed,  as  the  purpose  and  highest 
general  end  of  fiction,  the  attainment  of  disinterested- 
ness or  impersonality.  Leaving  aside  for  the  moment 
the  hundred  technical  questions  of  method  and  de- 
sign, we  begin  to  see  that  whatever  furthers  and  en- 
forces this  quality  is  theoretically  to  be  desired,  and 
whatever  impedes  or  befogs  it  to  be  deplored.  The 
sentimental  spirit  and  the  didactic  or  preaching  spirit, 
two  influences  of  a  close  cousinship,  fall  into  their 
places  in  the  argument  as  two  of  the  principal  forces 
which  defeat  impersonality  or  disinterestedness.  The 
relation  between  these  two  is  that  of  a  greater  and  a 
lesser — or,  if  we  must  have  a  distinction,  let  didacti- 
cism be  the  cant  of  the  mind,  sentimentalism  the  more 
fundamental  cant  of  the  soul.  The  two  are  one  at 
least  in  the  egotism  which  gives  them  breath  and  be- 
ing ;  the  didactic  feeling  is  sentimental  egotism  with  a 
specialized  twist.  We  have  seen  also  that  Comedy, 
"the  laughter  of  the  mind,"  is  the  mortal  enemy  of 
sentimentalists  in  general.  Here  is  the  basic  conflict, 
that  between  impartial  and  partisan,  between  disinter- 
ested and  egotistical.  We  shall  have  enlarged  the 
argument  and  deepened  its  foundation  still  further  on 

133 


134  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

this  other  side,  the  constructive,  as  soon  as  we  have 
seen  that,  just  as  didacticism  is  the  sentimental  spirit 
specialized,  so  Comedy  is  only  a  specialized  and  con- 
centrated mode  of  the  spirit  which  always  opposes  the 
egotism  in  fiction — the  spirit  which  we  may  broadly 
and  loosely  name  Satire. 

For  the  sake,  then,  of  generalizing  the  historical 
conflict  between  two  tendencies,  I  take  our  two  im- 
portant and  familiar  words  and  do  some  apparent 
violence  to  them  by  giving  each  the  largest,  least  tech- 
nical definition  possible.  Sentimentalism  is  the  spirit 
that  enjoys;  in  fiction,  it  is  a  preponderance  of  the 
emotional  element.  Satire  is  the  spirit  that  protests ; 
and  nearly  always  so  far  it  has  constituted  the  intel- 
lectual element  in  fiction.  The  sentimentalist  feels 
more  than  he  thinks;  we  measure  him  by  his  enjoy- 
ments. The  satirist  thinks  more  than  he  feels,  and 
we  measure  him  by  his  aversions.  Unreflective  sym- 
pathy and  reflective  hatred,  these  are  the  two  great 
opposed  spirits  of  fiction,  the  self-interest  and  the  dis- 
interestedness of  the  novel  as  we  know  it  in  history. 

There  can  be  no  great  difficulty  about  the  use  of 
our  two  words  in  this  somewhat  lax  way :  we  use  words 
as  we  will,  so  long  as  it  is  kept  before  us  exactly  how 
we  are  using  them.  But  there  is  a  seeming  paradox 
in  the  assertion  that  the  hatred  in  fiction  is  more 
intellectual  than  the  sympathy.  Enjoyment  is  a 
purely  personal  predilection,  indeed :  but  is  not  hate 
a  personal  predilection  inverted?  Is  there  anything 
more  intellectual  in  choosing  arbitrarily  against  a 
thing    than    in    choosing    arbitrarily    for   it?    Why 


SATIRE  135 


are  not  both  matters  of  caprice,  of  temperamental  ac- 
cident merely?  In  ethics,  perhaps  they  are;  not,  I 
think,  in  literature.  Our  retort  may  well  be  that,  in 
the  novel,  enjoyment  remains  as  arbitrary  as  in  per- 
sonal experience,  whereas  aversion  ceases  to  be  purely 
arbitrary  by  the  very  fact  of  its  successful  transfer- 
ence to  literature.  You  may  love  with  no  argument 
beyond  the  wholly  personal  one  of  your  own  quick- 
ened intuitions  and  sympathies.  And  so,  in  practical 
life,  you  may  hate,  with  no  argument  except  that  of 
the  nerves.  But  put  your  hatred  into  a  book,  and 
you  have  to  make  some  show  of  impersonal  justifi- 
cation for  it;  you  have  to  imply  categories,  dis- 
criminations, and  find  other  than  merely  personal 
excuses  for  them.  In  short,  you  have  to  adduce 
plenty  of  sound  logical  reasons  why  other  persons, 
your  readers  among  them,  should  hate  as  you  do.  In 
actual  practice,  then,  hate  turns  out  to  be  the  more 
impersonal  feeling — the  more  reasoned,  the  more  in- 
tellectual, the  more  disinterested,  and  by  all  odds  the 
more  social. 

Theorizing,  it  will  have  appeared,  lends  some  col- 
our of  probability  to  the  contrast  as  I  have  just  stated 
it.  Now,  to  come  from  theory  to  history.  It  hap- 
pens that  we  can  observe  the  workings  of  these  two 
forces,  the  self-asserting  love  and  the  self-forgetting 
hate,  especially  well  in  English  fiction,  because  in 
English  fiction  rather  more  than  elsewhere  the  novel 
has  achieved  greatness  rather  through  splendid  par- 
ticular excesses  than  through  the  balance  and  match- 
ing of  all  qualities.     Whenever  the  novel  has  not  had 


136  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

the  heart-ache  of  sensibility,  it  has  had  the  head-ache 
of  ratiocination. 

We  see  the  duel  between  the  man  of  feeling  and 
the  man  of  reflection,  not  begun,  indeed,  but  mo- 
mentously represented,  in  Richardson  and  Fielding. 
We  can  follow  it  through  their  descendants  to  the 
edge  of  our  own  generation.  The  novel  has  grown, 
as  Dean  Briggs  says  colts  and  young  boys  do,  "one 
end  at  a  time,"  and  its  major  prophets  are  those  who 
have  obviously  thought  more  than  they  felt  or  felt 
more  than  they  thought.  I  do  not  of  course  mean  to 
blame  Richardson  and  Fielding  for  all,  or  most,  that 
clutters  our  modern  field,  though  they  do  seem  proto- 
typical of  a  great  deal  of  it.  But  one  must  insist  on 
what  they  broadly  represent:  the  general  contest  be- 
tween thinking  and  feeling,  the  everlasting  tug-of-war 
between  temperaments,  which  in  each  generation  has 
pulled  at  fiction  and  stretched  it  more  or  less  out  of 
shape,  giving  it  here  a  decided  bulge  toward  the  emo- 
tional, there  the  opposite  bulge  toward  the  intellectual, 
as  sentimentalism  or  satire  has  predominated.  And 
it  oddly  appears  everywhere,  in  confirmation  of  my 
present  point,  that  the  intellectualist  is  a  person  whom 
we  remember  by  his  dislikes,  and  describe  in  terms  of 
the  things  he  makes  war  on.  So  far  in  the  history 
of  fiction,  there  is  a  link  between  emotionalism  and 
irresponsibility,  between  intellect  and  responsibility. 
The  personal  aversions  are  more  closely  reasoned  than 
the  personal  predilections.  Richardson  loved,  with  all 
his  sensibilities,  some  things  that  do  not  commend 


SATIRE  137 


themselves  to  the  intelligence;  and  Fielding — to  put 
the  matter  shortly — hated  Richardson.  The  ' '  Gothic ' ' 
romance  loved  spookery  and  neurasthenia  for  their 
own  sakes;  Jane  Austen  hated  those  things  for  the 
sake  of  common  sense.  It  would  make  a  long  story 
if  one  were  to  recount  the  hatreds  of  Dickens — for 
brutal  schools  and  brutal  prisons,  for  the  injustice 
and  incompetence  of  the  law,  for  the  pretentiousness 
and  coxcombry  of  church  and  press  and  forum.  We 
can  summarize  Dickens  in  this  context  by  saying  that 
even  the  characters  whom  he  loves  are  presented  to 
us  in  terms  of  the  things  they  rationally  hate,  as  the 
elder  Weller  in  terms  of  his  most  rational  hatred  of 
Stiggins. 

If  one  had,  then,  to  affix  a  single  label  to  the  evo- 
lution of  fiction  in  the  last  hundred  and  fifty  years, 
that  label  would  be  the  search  for  impersonality,  for 
a  larger  way  of  looking  at  things  than  the  way  of 
merely  capricious  preference.  From  Lyly  to  Rich- 
ardson fiction  gropes  for  realism  of  method  and  of 
detail — for  verisimilitude.  From  Richardson  to 
Thomas  Hardy,  the  period  when  the  novel  was  attain- 
ing its  majority  as  a  formal  art,  it  groped  for  disinter- 
estedness, intellectual  strength,  a  social  point  of  view. 
Sensibility  could  not  supply  these,  because  it  was  not 
critical  enough ;  reasoned  antipathies,  oftenest  sharp- 
ened with  scorn,  supplied  or  tended  to  supply  them  in 
terms  of  adverse  criticism — or,  as  I  have  put  it  in  a 
roughly  summarizing  term,  Satire. 


138  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

II 

AVe  ought  perhaps  to  retrace  enough  steps  to  find 
the  distinction  between  this  general  spirit  of  protest, 
or  Satire,  and  didacticism.  Both  of  them  take  a 
stand,  both  are  designed  to  instruct;  but  the  stand 
taken  by  satire  is  against  rather  than  for  something, 
and  it  instructs  us  in  what  to  avoid,  not  in  what  to  do. 
The  difference  is  that  between  affirmative  and  nega- 
tive. What  to  do  can  be  one  of  the  most  difficult  of 
human  problems,  soluble  after  all  more  in  terms  of 
motives  than  in  terms  of  actions  themselves — a  point 
which  didactic  writers  nearly  always  miss.  But  what 
to  reject,  what  to  loathe — this  is  oftenest  a  much 
easier  problem.  The  socializing  influence  of  hatred 
is  a  subject  hardly  done  justice  to  in  the  theorizing 
of  moral  economists,  who  will  have  perhaps  somewhat 
to  learn  from  the  vast  and  terrific  exhibitions  of  that 
very  principle  among  great  modern  nations  at  war. 

Most  persons,  even  those  of  extremely  divergent 
positive  tastes,  can  finding  footing  of  solidarity  in 
endless  common  aversions.  Henry  James  gave,  in 
The  American,  a  sentence  of  proof  how  he  under- 
stood this  potentiality  in  the  unlovely  side  of  human 
nature.  Christopher  Newman,  outraged  and  humili- 
ated, sees,  as  he  reflects  upon  the  family  which  has  done 
him  a  calculated  wrong,  that  their  conjoint  will  to  in- 
jure was  after  all,  in  its  way,  an  aspiration  above  in- 
dividual self-seeking:  ".  .  .  it  was  a  link  for  them, 
perhaps,  their  having  so  hurt  him. ' ' *     This  is  not  an 

i  The  American,  Chapter  XXVI. 


SATIRE  139 


achievement  of  community  on  the  highest  possible 
plane,  this  solidarity  of  hatred  in  a  nation,  a  class,  or 
a  family ;  but  it  is  at  least  not  all  evil.  We  shall  find 
perhaps  that  neither  is  the  hatred  in  fiction  the  ulti- 
mate moral  achievement;  but  it  is  at  least  a  moral 
achievement,  as  the  merely  basking  and  irresponsible 
enjoyment  quite  fails  to  be.  Satire,  like  didacticism, 
does  then  affirm  something,  but  only  a  negative  some- 
thing— a  denial.  The  novel  cannot  recommend  a 
cause  without  preaching;  but  it  can  riddle  a  cause, 
it  can  point  the  scornful  finger,  without  so  prejudi- 
cially committing  itself. 

I  have  said  that  satire  is  clearly  negative  instead 
of  affirmative ;  but  this  does  not  mean  that  it  is  neces- 
sarily destructive  instead  of  constructive.  It  is  an 
axiom  of  literature,  whatever  may  be  said  of  politics 
and  religion,  that  some  sort  of  destruction  is  often  the 
only  possible  kind  of  construction.  Satire  has  at  dif- 
ferent times — notably  in  verse  of  the  second  third 
of  the  18th  century — fallen  to  the  low  estate  of  a 
convention ;  the  accent  of  Juvenal  has  become  the  ac- 
cent of  fashion.  But  at  its  best  satire  is  the  gesture 
of  idealism  and  of  righteous  human  indignation  in 
the  presence  of  abuses  not  to  be  borne ;  the  natural  re- 
sponse of  the  moral  sense  to  the  various  affronts  by 
injustice  and  corruption  in  a  world  out  of  joint,  or 
seen  by  the  satirist  as  being  out  of  joint.  "When  there 
is  so  much  for  ordinary  decency  to  loathe,  how  idle  to 
give  one's  self  up  to  tender  dreaming!  this  is  the 
mood  underlying  really  noble  satire.  The  method 
may  be  destructive,  but  the  spirit  is  something  more. 


140  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

The  best  satire  of  Swift,  of  Goldsmith,  of  Dickens, 
even  of  Smollett — is  it  not  at  once  both  humanistic 
and  humanitarian  in  its  effect  ?  To  denounce  a  wrong 
is  to  enforce  some  alternative  right;  when  the  heart 
is  made  to  burn  most  hotly  against  obvious  injustices, 
then  it  is  nearest  to  melting  in  that  pity  and  fear 
which,  according  to  Aristotle,  are  the  purifying  emo- 
tions of  tragedy.  And  even  when  the  satire  is  cold, 
as  it  commonly  is  when  given  the  inflection  known  as 
irony,  it  still  makes  us  hate  in  a  greater  cause  than 
self-interest,  and  encourages  us  to  want  noble  things 
while  resenting  ignoble  ones.  Any  one  can  verify  for 
himself  this  constructive  and  humanizing  power  of 
rightly  directed  aversion,  by  considering  for  a  mo- 
ment Fielding's  picture  of  hypocrisy  in  Blifil,  George 
Eliot's  of  weak  infidelity  in  Tito  Melema,  Hardy's  of 
narrow  self-righteous  goodness  in  Angel  Clare,  or  any 
of  a  hundred  other  portraits  of  characters  whom  we 
were  meant  to  admire  as  inventions  but  to  detest  as 
personal  embodiments  of  certain  traits. 

Satire  makes  hatred  impressive  and  valid,  in  short, 
whenever  it  makes  it  most  nearly  universal.  If  it  be 
asked  whether  the  satirist  is  not  in  some  danger  of 
tumbling  into  the  pitfall  of  sentimentalism  and  of 
missing  a  just  breadth  of  appeal  by  stressing  aversions 
not  belonging  to  our  common  human  idealism,  we  may 
indeed  concede  the  point.  And  for  illustration  of  it 
we  have  to  look  no  farther  than  to  Swift  as  he  wrote 
in  the  hours  when,  carried  along  on  the  force  of  his 
own  invective  and  lashing  himself  into  a  misanthropic 
fury,  he  ceased  to  make  the  good  hate  the  evil  in  man 


SATIRE  141 


and  portrayed  all  humankind  as  evil  utterly.  In  the 
last  book  of  Gulliver's  Travels,  where  man  is  exclu- 
sively a  Yahoo  and  all  his  character  is  in  "the  teeth 
and  the  claws,"  pity  recoils  upon  the  author  himself, 
and  fear  shrivels  us  more  than  it  purifies.  Satire  is 
purging  only  when  it  points  to  aversions  which  we  can 
all  be  made  to  share ;  when  it  denounces  inhumanity 
for  the  sake  of  humanity.  It  is  beside  the  point  to  de- 
nounce humanity,  for  to  do  that  is  to  reject  everything. 
Satire  must  keep  its  categories  and  discriminations; 
and  they  must  be  founded  on  principles  which  go 
deeper  than  argument,  principles  which  we  are  bound 
to  hold  to  by  virtue  of  our  existence  as  social  human 
beings  of  a  common  origin,  common  interests,  and  a 
common  destiny. 


Ill 


This  paradox,  the  constructive  potentiality  of  a 
method  purely  negative,  appears  in  the  most  elab- 
orate examples  of  satire  of  the  type  voyage  imaginaire, 
all  the  way  from  The  Ultimate  Things  Beyond  Thule 
by  Antonius  Diogenes  [  ?]  to  M.  Anatole  France's 
L'lle  des  Pingouins,  and,  in  classic  English,  from  De- 
foe's Memoirs  of  Sundry  Transactions  in  the  World  of 
the  Moon  and  Swift's  Gulliver  to  the  late  Samuel  But- 
ler's Erewhon  and  Erewhon  Revisited.  All  of  these 
are  the  Utopian  romance  more  or  less  inverted.  I  pass 
over  this  form,  with  but  this  incidental  note,  in  order 
to  come  to  a  still  more  refined  and  specialized  applica- 
tion of  satire  which  has  rather  more  to  do  with  the 


142  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

realistic  novel ;  a  genre  of  satire  reduced  to  a  formal, 
calculated,  and  sustained  system  of  irony,  of  which  we 
have  two  illustrious  examples  in  English,  separated 
by  almost  exactly  a  century:  Fielding's  Jonathan 
Wild  the  Great  and  Thackeray's  Barry  Lyndon,  the 
second  of  these  in  dehnite  and  unmistakable  imitation 
of  the  first. 

These  are  the  old  picaresque  novel  in  an  elaborate 
mask.  Their  subject  matter  is  unscrupulous  but  pic- 
turesque roguery ;  their  method  is  to  hold  that  roguery 
up  to  mock  admiration,  very  much  as  Swift,  in  such 
essays  as  A  Modest  Proposal,  affects  a  mock  admira- 
tion for  the  ruthless  inhumanity  of  oppressors  of  the 
poor.  Jonathan  Wild  is  a  personage  of  undeviating 
criminality;  the  beautiful  consistency  of  his  life  is 
marred  by  scarce  a  single  generous  deed  or  decent 
impulse.  From  the  time  of  his  youthful  captaincy 
over  a  gang  of  orchard  robbers,  when  he  was  invari- 
ably ' '  treasurer  of  the  booty,  some  little  part  of  which 
he  would  now  and  then,  with  wonderful  generosity, 
bestow  on  those  who  took  it, ' '  until  his  consummation 
on  the  scaffold  or  "tree  of  glory,"  when  he  found 
breath  to  deliver  "a  hearty  curse"  upon  the  as- 
sembled crowd,  he  showed  himself  to  be  "not  re- 
strained by  any  of  those  weaknesses  which  disappoint 
the  views  of  mean  and  vulgar  souls,  and  which  are 
comprehended  in  one  general  term  of  honesty,  which 
is  a  corruption  of  HONOSTY,  a  word  derived  from 
what  the  Greeks  call  an  ass."  From  the  title-page  to 
the  closing  sentence  there  is  an  incessant  harping  on 
the  word  "greatness,"  used  in  this  scheme  of  irony 


SATIRE  143 


to  mean  material  success  without  moral  goodness. 
And  when,  near  the  end,  Fielding  reduces  the  career 
of  his  infamous  protagonist  to  a  list  of  elementary 
principles  of  ' '  greatness, ' '  behold  !  that  list  exactly 
defines  and  delineates  the  practices  by  which  Fielding 
saw  eminence  achieved  in  the  most  respected  careers 
of  his  own  18th  century  world.  His  purpose  is 
to  show  how  a  boot-licking  society  worshipped  pres- 
tige no  matter  how  gained;  his  method  is  to  draw  a 
grotesque  parallel  between  the  successful  man  of  the 
great  world  and  the  successful  criminal  of  the  under- 
world, and  to  signify  that  the  one  is  as  little  worthy 
of  admiration  as  the  other.  This  catalogue  of  prin- 
ciples, as  applicable  to  a  Robert  Walpole  as  to  a  Jona- 
than Wild,  seems  to  me  to  be  among  the  most  ingenious 
and  pointed  uses  of  savage  irony  in  English: 

"1.  Never  to  do  more  mischief  to  another  than  was  nec- 
essary to  the  effecting  of  his  purpose;  for  that  mis- 
chief was  too  precious  a  thing  to  be  thrown  away. 

"2.  To  know  no  distinction  of  men  from  affection ;  but  to 
sacrifice  all  with  equal  readiness  to  his  interest. 

"3.  Never  to  communicate  more  of  an  affair  than  was 
necessary  to  the  person  who  was  to  execute  it. 

"4.  Not  to  trust  him  who  hath  deceived  you,  nor  who 
knows  he  hath  been  deceived  by  you. 

"5.  To  forgive  no  enemy;  but  to  be  cautious  and  often 
dilatory  in  revenge. 

"6.  To  shun  poverty  and  distress,  but  to  ally  himself  as 
close  as  possible  to  power  and  riches. 

"7.  To  maintain  a  constant  gravity  in  his  countenance  and 
behaviour,  and  to  affect  wisdom  on  all  occasions. 

"8.  To  foment  eternal  jealousies  in  his  gang,  one  of  an- 
another. 


144  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


"9.  Never  to  reward  any  one  equal  to  his  merit;  but  al- 
ways to  insinuate  that  the  reward  was  above  it. 

"10.  That  all  men  were  knaves  or  fools,  and  much  the 
greater  number  a  composition  of  both. 

"11.  That  a  good  name,  like  money,  must  be  parted  with, 
or  at  least  greatly  risked,  in  order  to  bring  the  owner 
any  advantage. 

"12.  That  virtues,  like  precious  stones,  were  easily  coun- 
terfeited; that  the  counterfeits  in  both  cases  adorned 
the  wearer  equally,  and  that  very  few  had  knowledge 
or  discernment  sufficient  to  distinguish  the  counter- 
feit jewel  from  the  real. 

"13.  That  many  men  were  undone  by  not  going  deep 
enough  in  roguery;  as  in  gaming  any  man  may  be  a 
loser  who  doth  not  play  the  whole  game. 

"14.  That  men  proclaim  their  own  virtues,  as  shopkeepers 
expose  their  goods,  in  order  to  profit  by  them. 

"15.  That  the  heart  was  the  proper  seat  of  hatred,  and  the 
countenance  of  affection  and  friendship."  : 

This  extraordinary  satire  of  Fielding,  and  Thack- 
eray's more  sprightly  imitation  of  it,  serve  well 
enough  to  introduce  us  to  one  of  the  great  questions 
of  artistic  economy  in  the  novel:  To  what  extent 
is  it  expedient,  and  to  what  extent  right,  for  fiction 
to  specialize  in  the  vicious,  the  criminal,  the  de- 
cadent, the  morbid?  Is  it  good  taste,  and  is  it  ethical, 
for  art  to  deal  extensively  with  what  is  inherently 
forbidding  or  repulsive?  Of  course  these  two  pieces 
of  irony  do  not  actually  help  us  answer  the  question, 
because  they  mean  the  opposite  of  what  they  say ;  but 
they  do  interestingly  suggest  the  question.  And  we 
have  to  face  that  question  squarely  in  such  stories  as 
deal  literally  with  evil  character  and  action. 

i  Jonathan  Wild  the  Great,  Book  IV,  Chapter  XII. 


SATIRE  145 


Theoretically  and  a  priori,  we  should  have  to  say 
that  art  ought  to  encourage  and  inspirit  us,  not  de- 
press. But  instantly  there  arises  another  question: 
May  not  it  truly  hearten  and  inspirit  us,  by  indirec- 
tion, through  display  of  things  to  be  shunned,  and 
through  the  moral  recoil  provoked  by  such  dis- 
play? And  there  is  obviously  something  to  be  said 
in  the  affirmative.  Mr.  Chesterton,  speaking  particu- 
larly of  Fielding  and  Tom  Jones,  says :  ' ' We  have 
grown  to  associate  morality  in  a  book  with  a  kind  of 
optimism  and  prettiness;  according  to  us,  a  moral 
book  is  a  book  about  moral  people.  But  the  old  idea 
was  almost  exactly  the  opposite;  a  moral  book  was  a 
book  about  immoral  people.  A  moral  book  was  full 
of  pictures  like  Hogarth's  Gin  Lane  or  Stages  of 
Cruelty,  or  it  recorded,  like  the  popular  broadsheet, 
God's  Dreadful  Judgment  against  some  blasphemer 
or  murderer.  .  .  .  Telling  the  truth  about  the  terrible 
struggle  of  the  human  soul  is  surely  a  very  elemen- 
tary part  of  the  ethics  of  honesty.  If  the  characters 
are  not  wicked,  the  book  is. "  1 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  though,  it  is  not  very  helpful 
to  try  to  answer  such  questions  theoretically  and  a 
priori.  They  have  to  be  answered  historically,  with 
reference  to  that  which  has  proved  itself  excellent. 
And  we  find,  whether  we  begin  with  Euripides  or 
with  Chaucer  or  with  Shakspere  or  with  Fielding, 
that  no  very  enduring  writer  has  tried  to  shirk  the 
problem  of  evil.     Some  of  the  characters  who   are 

*  All  Things  Considered.  By  G.  K.  Chesterton.  New  York: 
John  Lane  Co.     MCMIX.     Pp.  264-66. 


146  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


greatest  as  creations  are  least  great  as  moral  beings; 
some  of  the  books  which  most  develop  and  crystallize 
our  moral  ideas  do  so  through  the  presentation  of 
guilt.  To  summarize,  still  measuring  by  this  same 
very  handy  yardstick  of  what  has  proved  itself  of  en- 
during merit,  we  can  make  out  at  least  these  few  ten- 
able principles: 

First,  the  artist's  business  is  with  the  whole  of  life ; 
and  there  is  no  department  or  phase  of  it  into  which 
he  may  not  go,  granted  only  enough  conscience  and 
enough  skill. 

Secondly,  he  must  have  that  conscience  and  that 
skill :  we  must  feel  the  soundness  of  his  purpose,  and 
there  must  be  no  blurring  of  moral  values,  no  false 
glamour  to  make  us  forget  that  we  are  supposed  to  be 
reading  a  criticism  of  life  performed  under  certain 
standards.  Evil  when  shown  in  books  can  serve  no 
self -justifying  purpose  unless  it  is  known  as  evil.  We 
see  an  infringement  of  this  law  in  a  modern  fashion 
of  sentimentalizing  crime  and  criminals,  and  in  a  cur- 
rent fashion  of  looking  so  indulgently  upon  the 
tawdry  philanderings  of  sexually  irresponsible  per- 
sons as  to  carry  indulgence  over  into  a  sort  of  per- 
verted evangelism  of  the  fleshly  lusts. 

Thirdly,  if  the  artist  lack  critical  sense,  if  he  tacitly 
accept  evil  as  normal,  or  as  indistinguishable  from 
good,  he  is  convicted  by  his  own  handiwork;  he  has 
palpably  made  the  worse  appear  the  better  reason — 
in  which  event  he  pays,  as  history  abundantly  proves, 
the  penalty  of  a  speedy  oblivion.  The  dogma  of  "Art 
for  Art's  sake"  is  eminently  productive  of  this  danger 


SATIRE  147 


— Art  being  unintelligible  except  as  a  ministration  to 
the  highest  pleasures  of  man,  and  the  pleasures  of  the 
gratified  moral  sense  being  surely  among  those 
highest. 

All  of  life,  then,  is  open  to  the  artist ;  and  we  may 
say  that  the  quintessence  of  art  is  some  sort  of  strug- 
gle, on  a  higher  or  lower  plane,  between  something 
which  ought  to  enlist  the  moral  sympathies  of  the 
reader  and  something  else  which  ought  to  repel  them. 
But  the  artist  is  responsible  for  the  meaning  of  that 
struggle  and  for  the  plane  on  which  it  takes  place; 
and  if  the  meaning  be  perverted  or  the  plane  a  low  one, 
there  is  no  excusing  the  artist  on  the  ground  of  his 
invisible  good  intention  or  his  honest  error  or  in- 
capacity. 


IV 


It  was  through  the  study  of  evil  in  character  that 
satire  achieved  the  most  important  development  of  its 
whole  history  on  the  non-technical  side — a  develop- 
ment which  involved  something  amounting  to  the  de- 
struction of  satire  as  such,  and  the  transmutation  of 
it  into  something  still  more  disinterested  and  imper- 
sonal. I  can  state  this  development  succinctly  by  say- 
ing that,  before  the  19th  century  was  far  advanced, 
the  villain  passed  out  of  literature. 

The  passing  of  the  villain  is  one  of  the  most  inter- 
esting phases  of  literary  history  since  Jane  Austen. 
With  the  assimilation  of  the  romantic  blend  of  hu- 
manitarianism  and  individualism,  the  villain  found 


148  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

two  possible  destinies  awaiting  him.  He  could  become 
the  Byronic  hero,  a  superman  full  of  sin  and  Welt- 
schmerz  and  glamour,  a  dark  fallen  angel,  an  attitud- 
inizing rebel  hero ;  or  he  could  become  a  human  being 
just  a  little  on  the  lower  side  of  the  median  of  average 
human  goodness — the  victim  of  accidents  in  heredity 
or  circumstance,  a  weaker  brother  but  not  a  com- 
pendium of  all  possible  malice  and  unscrupulousness. 
"Where  the  romantic  individualism  triumphed,  as  in  the 
earlier  Bulwer-Lytton,  the  villain  became  the  Byronic 
hero ;  where  the  romantic  humanitarianism  triumphed, 
as  in  Dickens,  the  villain  became  a  human  being — 
with  a  sentimental  proclivity,  it  must  be  added,  for 
becoming  in  the  last  chapter  an  unnaturally  good  one. 
This  epoch,  the  late  Romantic  and  early  Victorian,  is 
the  epoch  of  the  desperate  criminal  presented  as  a 
creature  of  good  impulses  misdirected,  an  ogre  who 
might  as  easily  have  been  an  angel  if  he  had  had  bet- 
ter luck  with  his  parents  and  his  education.  The 
Byronic  superman  we  may  profitably  discard:  his 
existence  in  letters  becomes  more  and  more  precarious, 
until  he  passes  into  juvenile  fiction  and  melodrama— 
for  example,  the  astonishingly  ornate  and  intricate 
melodrama  of  Wilkie  Collins. 

But  the  other  type  of  converted  villain,  the  type 
which  evolves  toward  average  manhood,  and  not  to- 
ward the  fallen  angels,  is  of  genuine  importance. 
Sentimentalized  as  was  the  treatment  of  him  before 
1845,  illogical  and  shallow  as  was  the  sympathy  lav- 
ished upon  him  in  some  quarters,  notably  in  parts  of 
Dickens,  the  human  villain  was  to  live  on  and  wax 


SATIRE  149 


great,  not  only  overcoming  the  propensity  of  his  cre- 
ators to  weep  and  sigh  over  him,  but  actually  over- 
coming in  the  end  the  whole  practice  of  satire  as  an 
unequivocal  issue  between  black  and  white,  evil  and 
good.  The  villain  was  originated  in  sentimentalism, 
but  he  was  continued  in  the  scientific  spirit.  When 
it  was  once  seen  that  any  really  interesting  villain 
was  made  up  of  a  great  deal  of  humanity  plus  a 
certain  admixture  of  evil  inclination,  it  was  sure 
to  be  seen  next  that  any  really  interesting  person 
was  a  quite  similar  compound.  In  other  words,  as 
soon  as  the  humanitarian  feeling  and  the  sense  of 
brotherhood  became  assimilated  and  rationalized,  the 
struggle  of  fiction  became  transferred  from  the  stage 
where  hero  contends  against  villain  to  the  other  stage 
where  he  contends  against  the  unheroic  in  himself. 
The  issue  is  just  as  sharp,  just  as  definitive;  the  di- 
rection of  our  moral  aversion  is  no  more  ambiguous 
than  before ;  but  its  object  is  now  only  part  of  a  char- 
acter, the  weakness  or  failing  of  an  individual  with 
whom  on  the  whole  we  identify  ourselves  in  sympathy. 
Mankind  is  no  longer  classifiable  into  devils  to  hate 
and  angels  to  love: 

"Some  are  fine  fellows,  some  right  scurvy; 
Most,  a  dash  between  the  two" — 

and  the  task  of  the  novelist  and  his  reader  is  neither 
to  hate  nor  to  love,  but  to  understand. 

Fielding,  of  course,  showed  a  considerable  mastery 
of  this  mingled  affair,  human  nature,  but  came  too 
early  to  discard  the  machinery  of  the  superficial  vil- 


150  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

lain.  He  gives  us,  roughly,  a  heroine  who  is  perfect 
angel,  a  villain  who  is  perfect  devil  except  that  he  is 
not  a  gentleman,  and  a  hero  who  is  indeed  ' '  a  dash  be- 
tween the  two, ' '  a  creature  near  to  the  human  average. 
Jane  Austen,  whose  genius  is  throughout  one  of  rare 
and  almost  miraculous  anticipations,  is  most  of  all  in 
advance  of  the  novel  of  her  day  in  this  respect,  the  com- 
plete human  credibility  of  practically  all  her  puppets. 
Historically,  the  full  fruition  of  the  modern  scientific 
and  impersonal  interest  in  evil  occurs  in  George  Eliot. 
The  first  of  great  English  novelists  to  come  to  her 
proper  work  from  philosophy  and  the  abstract  sci- 
ences, she  is  before  all  else  the  analyst  of  that  sin 
which  is  omission,  and  the  cause  of  which  is  weak- 
ness. She  studies,  in  one  crucial  instance  after  an- 
other, the  balance  of  power  between  opposed  forces 
in  the  single  character ;  and  she  never  makes  the  mis- 
take of  alienating  her  character  from  our  sympathy 
by  creating  him  a  prodigy  of  either  moral  extreme. 
Even  when  we  study  her  weaklings,  such  as  Tito 
Melema  and  Geoffrey  Cass,  aversion  is  mollified  by  un- 
derstanding; and  in  her  more  balanced  characters, 
such  as  Maggie  Tulliver  and  Romola — they  are  most 
often  women — the  presence  of  tragic  limitations  is 
precisely  what  wrings  out  the  last  drop  of  our  sym- 
pathy. If  we  hated  the  weakness  more  we  should 
understand  it  less;  and  if  the  human  imperfections 
were  absent  the  struggle  would  lose  all  its  moral 
poignancy.  In  George  Eliot's  work  we  see  satire  be- 
ginning to  turn  into  something  else. 


SATIRE  151 


V 


This  symptom,  the  dissolution  of  the  personal  vil- 
lain and  his  re-emergence  as  the  seed  of  evil  or  of 
weakness  in  average  human  nature,  points,  then,  to 
the  development  which  superseded  satire.  Sentimen- 
talism  came  first,  with  its  intuitional  and  unrenective 
enjoyment ;  its  limitation  was  that  it  got  itself  valued 
by  the  intensity  of  the  enjoyment  and  not  by  the  in- 
herent worth  of  the  things  to  be  enjoyed.  Satire  fol- 
lowed; a  reaction  against  sentimentalism,  and  an  ap- 
plication of  the  theory  that  you  could  save  yourself 
by  hating  hateful  things.  Satire  is  at  least,  for  this 
reason,  more  disinterested  than  sentimentalism.  But 
the  time  came,  with  the  decay  of  dogmatic  theology 
and  the  less  authoritative,  more  experimental  inter- 
pretation of  moral  law,  when  hatred  was  seen  to  be 
anachronistic  and  not  enough.  It  was  better,  of  course, 
to  hate  the  right  things  responsibly  than  to  love  the 
wrong  things,  or  even  the  right  ones,  irresponsibly ;  but 
the  sincere  part  of  the  Victorian  humanitarian  feeling 
had  somewhat  changed  the  emphasis  of  human  affec- 
tions generally.  It  will  be  fairly  accurate  to  say  that 
after  a  certain  point  the  19th  century  was  moved  to  see 
how  many  things  it  could  love  humanity  in  spite  of; 
that  is,  how  much  it  could  understandingly  forgive. 
And  its  forgiveness  was  based,  not  as  of  old  on  sensibil- 
ity, on  emotional  charity,  but  on  the  analytical  charity 
of  comprehension.  The  world  of  fiction  had  a  sudden 
vision  of  how  much  alike,  ultimately,  we  all  are. 


152  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


The  patient  anatomizing  which  George  Eliot  per- 
formed upon  the  conscience  and  the  feeling  of  per- 
sonal guilt  was,  as  I  suggested,  the  purely  rational 
fruit  of  this  new  feeling.  On.  the  purely  tempera- 
mental side,  we  find  its  fruit  in  Thackeray  and  in 
Anthony  Trollope,  taking  there  the  shape  of  their 
rare  and  unprecedented  tolerance  for  their  charac- 
ters. This  indulgent  and  benignant  irony  of  the  cre- 
ator toward  his  creatures  is  a  new  strain  in  the  novel. 
Jane  Austen,  serene  in  spirit  as  she  was,  quietly 
modulated  as  was  her  criticism,  would  have  no  non- 
sense from  her  persons ;  let  Miss  Bennet  in  her  preju- 
dice, or  Darcy  in  his  unregenerate  pride,  betray  an 
insincerity,  and  she  is  always  ready  with  a  tart  little 
rebuke.  She  will  love  them  so  long  as  they  are  hon- 
estly wrong;  but  let  them  be  guilty  of  posturing  or 
deceiving  themselves,  and  she  wastes  no  sympathy  on 
them.  Thackeray  and  Trollope  perform  the  miracle, 
almost  lost  since  Shakspere,  of  keeping  their  charac- 
ters vivid  and  whole  in  two  quite  separate  provinces : 
one  of  moral  common  sense,  where  we  know  their 
vices  exactly  and  will  tolerate  no  illusions  about  their 
worth,  and  another  of  pure  artistic  appreciation, 
where  they  perpetually  divert  us  by  being  them- 
selves. Thackeray  sustains  his  and  our  admiration 
for  such  designing  adventuresses  as  Becky  Sharp  and 
Blanche  Amory,  without  ever  pretending  that  they 
are  better  than  they  are ;  he  has  at  once  the  personal 
enjoyment  of  their  rarity,  and  the  impersonal  esti- 
mate  of  their  moral  deficiencies.  And  one  wonders 
whether  Trollope  could  ever  possibly  have  given  any 


SATIRE  153 


reader  the  joy  in  Mrs.  Proudie  that  he  found  in  her 
himself.  She  richly  merited  death;  there  are  many 
chapters  which  make  the  reader  want  to  lay  violent 
hands  on  her;  yet  Trollope  long  plotted  in  vain  to 
kill  her,  and  when,  under  the  spur  of  a  conversation 
about  her  overheard  in  a  library,  he  nerved  himself 
to  the  deed  and  went  home  and  committed  it,  he  felt 
as  though  lie  had  actually  done  murder.  This  was 
not  in  the  least  because  he  was  addicted  to  inventing 
sentimental  extenuations  of  Mrs.  Proudie 's  general 
hatefulness  and  hypocrisy:  it  was  because  he  had 
known  her  long  and  intimately  enough  to  see  that  she 
could  no  more  help  being  what  she  was  than  Mr. 
Harding  could  help  being  what  he  was.  This  toler- 
ance, of  the  intellect  alone  in  some  modern  persons, 
of  the  temperament  alone  in  others,  is  perhaps  the 
ultimate  human  wisdom.  At  all  events,  in  literature 
it  is  the  end  of  satire  as  a  formula  of  methodical 
scorn  or  ridicule. 

Since  Trollope  the  indulgent  view  of  human  nature 
has  had  its  way  more  and  more.  The  passing  of  dog- 
matic theology  weakens  the  feeling  of  a  hard-and-fast 
moral  law,  before  which  all  men  are  classifiable  as 
saints  or  sinners;  the  rapid  rise  and  triumph  of  the 
cosmic  sciences  make  an  organic  unit  of  the  world 
with  all  its  living  creatures,  intensifying  the  percep- 
tion that  all  are  knit  together  by  a  common  origin 
and  a  common  destiny,  the  social  sciences  have  their 
birth  in  this  feeling;  and  it  becomes  an  impossible 
anachronism  to  hate  again  in  the  old  unequivocating 
way.     One  must  either  renounce  the  violent  antipa- 


154  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

thies  altogether  and  replace  them  by  a  universal  tol- 
erance, or  else  one  must  find  something  larger  to  hate. 
Not  unnaturally,  both  possibilities  come  to  pass  in  a 
single  generation.  Zola  in  France  and  Gissing  in 
England  turned  the  novel  into  a  sort  of  laboratory  ex- 
periment, impersonally  conducted  and  carefully  mea- 
sured; man  is  analysed  in  certain  of  his  crucial  re- 
lations to  his  fellowmen.  At  the  same  time,  Samuel 
Butler  was  declaiming  against  man's  slavery  to  his 
heritage  from  past  generations,  hating  thus  a  part  of 
the  general  constitution  of  the  world.  And  before 
long  Hardy  was  to  personify  all  the  injustice  in  the 
world  as  a  malignant  God,  and  set  up  that  God  as  the 
object  of  man's  puny  and  ineffectual  curses.  This  is 
as  far  as  satire  can  go  toward  the  impersonal  and 
still  be  satire.  When  hatred  has  turned  from  actual 
men  and  women  and  their  actions  in  order  to  expend 
itself  on  an  evil  principle,  it  is  hatred  quite  deperson- 
alized. Since  1895  and  Jude  the  Obscure,  there  is  in 
fact  hardly  a  good  hater  left  in  British  fiction. 


VI 


THE   REALISTIC    SPIRIT 


In  describing  the  history  of  English  fiction  since 
1740  as  a  war  between  sentimentalism  and  satire, 
which  I  roughly  identified  respectively  with  the  emo- 
tional and  the  intellectual  elements  in  fiction,  I  had 
in  mind  a  certain  great  change  which  has  but  lately 
come  over  the  spirit  of  the  novel;  a  change  which 
amounts  to  nothing  less  than  a  pact  of  peace  a;ter 
this  long  feud,  and  which  is  so  important  that  it 
seems  to  promise  sweeping  changes  in  the  novel  of  the 
future,  a  quite  different  direction  and  set  of  intellec- 
tual ideals.  I  have  already  mentioned  several  middle 
and  late  Victorian  symptoms  of  the  struggle  of  the 
modern  novel  toward  intellectual  disinterestedness: 
such  symptoms  as  Thackeray's  indulgence  toward  the 
foibles  of  his  personae,  George  Eliot's  philosophical 
interest  in  the  nature  and  significance  of  evil,  Samuel 
Butler's  analysis  of  heredity,  Hardy's  indictment  of 
the  whole  world-purpose  as  a  cruel  irresponsibleness, 
and  Gissing's  researches  in  sociology;  to  which  we 
may  add,  of  course,  Meredith's  re-creation  of  Comedy 
as  "the  laughter  of  the  mind."  All  these  point  to 
the  one  fact :  the  passing  of  the  old  violent  and  arbi- 
trary antipathies.  Hatred  becomes  an  anachronism 
and  contempt  an  impertinence.  A  broader  interpre- 
tation of  what  the  world-organism  is,  and  of  how  cause 
interlocks  with  effect,  helps  the  novelist  see  that  all  of 

157 


158  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

us  equally  are  what  we  were  made,  what  we  cannot 
help  being ;  and  more  and  more  the  ideal  goal  of  fiction 
becomes  this  elemental  truth  of  cause  and  effect,  the 
truth  of  what  life  and  character  are  without  reference 
to  what  the  novelist  personally  would  like  them  to  be. 
The  old  intellectualisrn  of  satire  was  a  criticism  of 
life  in  the  adverse  sense  of  being  a  denunciation  of 
what  it  ought  uot  to  be.  The  new  intellectualism  is  a 
criticism  of  life  in  the  sense  of  being  simply  an  inter- 
pretation of  what  life  is,  beyond  our  power  to  help  or 
prevent.  The  temperamental  indulgence  of  Thack- 
eray becomes  the  philosophical  tolerance,  the  rooted 
conviction,  of  the  present  age ;  the  spirit  of  satire  be- 
comes what  I  shall  call,  to  distinguish  it  from  the 
realistic  technique  or  method,  the  new  Realistic  Spirit. 
I  have  said  that  this  recent  triumph  of  the  realistic 
spirit,  the  triumph  of  intellectualism  in  the  novel, 
marks  the  end  of  the  old  war  of  satirist  and  sentimen- 
talist; and  indeed  that  is  a  fact  which  we  need  to 
perceive  if  we  are  to  understand  what  the  fiction  of 
the  present  is  about,  and  what  the  fiction  of  the  future 
is  most  likely  to  be  about.  Sentimental  ism  was  sym- 
pathy, capriciously  and  arbitrarily  exerted :  the  realis- 
tic spirit  is  universal  sympathy,  an  attempt  to  under- 
stand everything  from  its  own  point  of  view.  Satire 
was  a  half-impersonal  attempt  to  define  something 
that  everybody  ought  to  hate:  the  realistic  spirit  is 
a  much  more  impersonal  attempt  to  show  that  there 
is  nothing  human  which  a  really  enlightened  mind 
ought  to  hate.  The  old  novel  was  intellectual  about  in 
proportion  as  it  was  polemical :  it  thought  and  fought, 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT       159 

or  it  felt  and  waxed  irresponsible.  The  new  spirit 
makes  it  at  once  less  polemical  and  more  intellectual. 
The  new  sympathy  is  more  analytical  than  the  old 
satire — besides  being  far  more  inclusive  than  the  old 
sympathy.  The  realist — I  speak  of  him  still  as  the 
child  of  his  time,  the  present,  peering  as  far  as  I  can 
through  the  dust  raised  by  lesser  conflicts  of  fashions 
and  personalities — the  realist  is  the  legitimate  child 
of  satirist  and  sentimentalist.  He  thinks  with  his 
sensibilities,  feels  with  his  intellect ;  criticism  and  en- 
joyment fuse.  Sentimentalism  dealt  with  the  egocen- 
tric life,  the  emotional  seemings  of  things  to  suscepti- 
ble folk;  satire  dealt  with  the  ethical  life,  the  possi- 
bilities of  things.  Our  realist  records  the  possibilities 
and  the  seemings,  but  not  to  identify  himself  with 
either;  for  he  sees  them  as  incidental  to  the  more 
probing  queston  of  what  life  inscrutably  is. 

We  may  leave  aside  for  the  moment  the  question 
of  whether  this  sweeping  change  in  fiction  is  a  change 
for  the  better,  a  growth.  I  think  we  can  see  pretty 
readily  that  it  is  inevitable,  and  that  its  inevitability 
lifts  it  above  the  rank  of  the  mere  fashions,  the  flux 
and  reflux,  that  in  every  age  exert  a  transient  effect 
on  the  shape  and  composition  of  the  novel.  I  can 
best  state  the  importance  of  this  change  if  I  say  that 
it  is  the  response  of  the  novel  to  the  corresponding 
change  which  has  come  over  everything  else.  Any  one 
who  will  take  the  trouble  to  read  the  polemical  and 
controversial  writings  of  such  a  man  as  Huxley  will 
see  how  man's  conception  of  the  world  changed  its 
center  of  gravity  in  the  thirty-five  years  after  the 


160  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

publication  of  Darwin's  Origin  of  Species.  The 
world  as  an  organization,  a  product  of  will,  became 
the  world  as  an  organism,  the  product  of  natural 
law ;  the  province  of  faith  appeared  to  shrink  and  that 
of  sight  to  expand ;  the  higher  criticism  had  its  way, 
first  with  Moses,  then  with  the  four  gospels;  and  be- 
fore 1890,  before  the  end  of  Huxley 's  long  controversy 
with  Gladstone  over  The  Impregnable  Rock  of  Holy 
Scripture,  it  was  possible  for  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward, 
whom  it  is  moderately  difficult  to  think  of  as  a  violent 
iconoclast,  to  write  an  important  novel,  Robert  Els- 
mere,  about  the  difficulty  which  any  modern  man  of 
both  intelligence  and  courage  must  experience  in  be- 
lieving the  dogmas  of  Christian  theology.  For  good  or 
evil,  the  world  had  to  consider  its  own  meaning  and  in- 
terpret its  own  natural  history  more  broadly,  less  arbi- 
trarily. The  natural  outcome  of  this  new  vision  of 
man  in  relation  to  all  things  was  the  rise  of  the  social 
sciences ;  the  perception  that  social  problems  are  often 
perhaps  insoluble,  that  at  any  rate  there  is  no  panacea. 
And  fiction,  partly  anticipating  and  partly  following 
the  tendency  visible  everywhere  else,  acquired  this 
open-mindedness,  became  impersonal  and  disinterested 
to  the  last  degree. 

Both  sentimentalism  and  satire  are  very  comfortable 
postures  in  an  orthodox  universe,  governed  by  divine 
law  and  dedicated  to  some  ultimate  enforcement  of 
order.  The  sentimentalist  feels  that  everything  is  al- 
ready settled  without  his  connivance,  and  that  he  may 
as  well  enjoy  what  appeals  to  him ;  the  satirist  thinks 
he  knows  just  how  everything  is  settled,  and,  under- 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        161 

standing  the  law,  can  do  no  less  than  lay  it  down. 
But  either  attitude  seems  childish  when  the  decay  of 
faith  turns  the  universe  into  an  overwhelming  riddle, 
its  truths  into  antiquated  speculations,  its  fixed  moral 
laws  into  mere  truisms  about  animal  behaviour.  The 
mature  man  then  is  he  who  senses  the  relative,  pro- 
visional, and  impermanent  status  of  all  that  is  thought 
or  known — the  man  without  prejudices.  Our  realist 
escapes  all  prejudices  by  respecting  all  opinions,  and 
rejecting  all.  He  has  the  open  inquiring  mind,  the 
steeled  heart.  He  believes  in  everything  as  an  evi- 
dence, but  in  nothing  as  a  proof.  His  mind  is  a 
sympathetic  and  submissive  recording  instrument  for 
the  actual;  for  every  experience,  thought,  memory, 
impression,  or  dream.  He  sympathizes  with  all,  be- 
cause his  philosophical  conscience  tells  him  that 
whatever  exists  is  worthy  of  sympathetic  understand- 
ing. In  short,  his  unremitting  effort  is  to  get  outside 
himself,  his  own  likes  and  dislikes,  and  finally  to  get 
outside  the  world,  outside  everything.  For  it  is  only 
from  that  impersonal  point  of  vantage,  he  tells  him- 
self, that  it  is  possible  to  see  through  everything. 
Likes  and  dislikes  become  relatively  meaningless  in  a 
world  conceived  as  an  evolutionary  unit,  in  which  we 
are  all  necessarily  parts  of  each  other. 


II 


This  new  mood  that  has  come  over  the  practice  of 
fiction  can  be  summarized  as  a  selfless  and  pervasive 


162  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


curiosity.  The  old  hatreds  have  passed,  irrecover- 
ably, it  would  seem.  Even  so  vigorous  a  fighting  man 
as  JIuxley,  defending  himself  from  the  charge  of 
having  gone  out  of  his  way  to  assail  things  commonly 
held  sacred,  says:  "I  .  .  .  steadfastly  deny  that 
'hatred  of  Christianity'  is  a  feeling  with  which  I  have 
any  acquaintance.  There  are  very  few  things  which 
I  find  it  permissible  to  hate ;  and  though,  it  may  be, 
that  some  of  the  organizations,  which  arrogate  to  them- 
selves the  Christian  name,  have  richly  earned  a  place 
in  the  category  of  hateful  things,  that  ought  to  have 
nothing  to  do  with  one's  estimation  of  the  religion, 
which  they  have  perverted  and  disfigured  out  of  all 
likeness  to  the  original."1  Thus,  in  the  chief  con- 
troversialist of  his  age,  a  scientific  impartiality  takes 
the  place  of  bias;  and  presently  that  mood  of  the 
laboratory,  the  mood  of  research,  has  conquered  the 
novel  and  annexed  it  as  an  invaluable  province. 

When  we  look  for  illustrations  through  fiction  of 
the  last  twenty  years,  we  do  not  have  to  go  unre- 
warded. If  we  examine  the  only  literary  career  since 
George  Eliot's  that  can  compare  in  length,  in  dignity, 
and  in  originality  with  the  careers  of  Hardy  and 
Meredith, — that  of  Henry  James,— we  shall  find  it 
animated  from  the  earliest  years  by  this  very  impulse 
of  curiosity.  Henry  James  won  his  first  distinction  as 
a  student  of  international  situations,  with  special  ref- 
erence to  the  American  abroad ;  and  of  all  the  writers 
in  his  generation  who  dealt  with  such  themes,  he  alone 

i  Science  and  Christian  Tradition,  p.  vii.  New  York:  D. 
Appleton  and  Co.,  1894. 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        163 

portrayed  Americans  and  Europeans  who  were  wise 
enough  to  learn  much  from  each  other,  too  wise  to  try 
to  teach  each  other  anything.  He  creates  the  best 
elements  discoverable  in  modern  characters  who  are 
products  of  quite  separate  places  and  traditions  of 
breeding,  and  then  simply  throws  those  contrasting  ele- 
ments together  in  crucial  situations  to  see  what  will 
happen.  He  takes  his  spoil,  his  trophy,  and  gives 
us  our  reward,  not  in  the  triumph  of  one  set  of  char- 
acters or  interests  over  another,  but  simply  in  the  tri- 
umph of  understanding  all  round.  And,  late  in  his 
life  when  his  work  of  fiction  was  almost  over  and  he 
sat  down  to  make  the  Prefaces  to  the  definitive  New 
York  edition  of  it, — a  series  of  the  most  valuable  docu- 
ments ever  produced  in  constructive  criticism  of  fic- 
tion as  an  art, — his  constant  emphasis  was  upon  the 
unflagging  ingenuity  and  patience  with  which  he  had 
drawn  his  clues  from  life  and  extricated  them 
from  the  mass  of  interfering  attendant  circum- 
stances. The  exertion  of  selfless  curiosity  is  to  him  a 
good  in  itself;  curiosity  is  the  only  one  of  his  emo- 
tions to  which  the  baffling  element  in  life  makes  any 
challenge  worth  accepting;  a  problematical  character 
or  situation  is  an  importunate  plea  addressed  to  his 
intuition ;  and  in  him  this  essentially  modern  disin- 
terested emotion  of  curiosity  enlarges  its  scope  until  it 
includes  compassion,  chivalry,  self-renunciation,  the 
uttermost  extension  of  delicacy,  and  what  Professor 
Wendell  has  called,  in  a  fine  commemorative  tribute, 
his  "exquisite  solicitude."  Henry  James  made  of 
curiosity  nothing  less  than  a  whole  philosophy  of  art 


164  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

and  life.  The  emotion  extends  its  scope  from  Roder- 
ick Hudson  and  The  American,  books  of  his  first  fame, 
to  The  Wings  of  the  Dove  and  T7ie  Golden  Bowl,  his 
crowning  attempts  to  tell  "the  story  that  cannot  be 
told."  And  The  Sacred  Fount,  the  one  novel  into 
which  he  deliberately  put  a  partial  portrait  of  himself, 
is  nothing  more  than  a  dramatization  of  enlightened 
curiosity,  of  a  sort  of  sublimated  appetite  for  benevo- 
lent gossip,  at  work  in  a  tangled  social  situation  where 
all  the  clues  are  not  material  but  spiritual  and  intui- 
tional. 

This  spirit  of  curiosity,  as  exhibited  quintessentially 
in  the  novels  and  tales  of  Henry  James,  strangely  ful- 
fils the  commandment  to  love  one's  neighbour  as  one's 
self;  the  realist's  effort  is  precisely  to  get  outside  him- 
self and  inside  his  neighbour,  to  see  others  as  they  see 
themselves.  This  self-suppression  is  conceived,  not  as 
a  moral  duty,  but  as  an  intellectual  privilege ;  but  the 
result  is  largely  the  same.  Why  blame  things  for  be- 
ing what  they  are,  when  everything  is  what  it  cannot 
help  being?  "To  understand  is  to  forgive."  Mr. 
John  Galsworthy  expresses  the  modern  spirit,  in  one 
of  his  brave  if  slightly  discouraged  sketches,  The  Inn 
of  Tranquillity,1  when  he  says  that  it  is  wrong  for 
one  of  us  to  despise  another,  because  "we  are  all  little 
bits  of  continuity."  "To  despise  one  another  is  to 
deny  continuity;  and  to  deny  continuity  is  to  deny 
eternity."  Each  of  us  is  only  a  drop  in  the  same 
ocean  of  being.    And  Mr.  Joseph   Conrad,   who  is 

i  The  Inn  of  Tranquillity.  By  John  Galsworthy.  New 
York:   Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT       165 

hardly  less  illuminating  in  discussion  of  his  art  than  in 
the  practice  of  it,  says  in  a  memorable  passage:  "... 
the  unwearied  self-forgetful  attention  to  every  phase  of 
the  living  universe  reflected  in  our  consciousness  may 
be  our  appointed  task  on  this  earth."1  "The  de- 
tached curiosity  of  a  subtle  mind"  is  the  faculty  which 
he  dramatizes  in  Chance — in  fact,  in  all  the  stories  re- 
lated by  Marlow — and  his  whole  philosophy  is  implied 
in  the  statement  that  "Resignation,  not  mystic,  not 
detached,  but  resignation  open-eyed,  conscious,  and 
informed  by  love,  is  the  only  one  of  our  feelings  for 
which  it  is  impossible  to  become  a  sham." 

It  would  be  easy  to  find  plenty  of  other  testimony  to 
this  same  effect,  but  none  more  authoritative  than  that 
of  these  three  artists  who  happen  also  to  be  critics  of 
their  art.  Impersonal  curiosity,  in  that  ultimate  de- 
velopment where  it  becomes  almost  a  synonym  of 
Christian  charity,  has  entered  the  novel  to  the  exclu- 
sion of  the  old  prides,  prejudices,  and  hates ;  and  it  is 
impossible  for  us  to  imagine  what  can  ever  drive  it  out 
again.  Science  has  created  a  new  world  and  de- 
stroyed the  old  world  behind  us;  we  cannot,  if  we 
would,  retreat  into  that  old  world  of  fixed  standards 
where  we  were  commanded  to  love  some  things  and 
hate  others.  Our  generation  has  seen  the  literature  of 
sentimentalism  become  more  "unofficial"  than  ever, 
and  sink  its  appeal  to  the  lowest  intelligences.  Mean- 
while, the  literature  of  satire  has  descended  to  mere 
muck-raking.     The  falling  to  pieces  of  these  tradi- 

M  Personal  Record,  p.  151.  New  York:  Harper  &  Bros. 
MCMXH. 


166  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

tional  extremes  and  the  emergence  between  them  of 
the  present  official  literature  of  curiosity,  of  investiga- 
tion under  the  realistic  spirit,  constitute  the  final  evi- 
dence of  the  change  that  has  come  over  things,  and 
of  its  general  irrevocableness. 


Ill 


So  far  I  find  myself  sufficiently  occupied  with 
merely  describing  and  reporting  the  tendency  which 
I  have  called  by  this  name  of  the  realistic  spirit.  But 
to  describe  is  not  necessarily  to  approve;  nor  do  I 
mean  to  let  the  discussion  become  wholly  uncritical. 
The  realistic  tendency  may  be  inevitable,  yet  at  the 
same  time  deplorable ;  and  if  we,  necessarily  the  chil- 
dren of  our  time,  see  inherent  weaknesses  and  short- 
comings in  the  mood  that  rules  us,  we  must  not  be 
afraid  to  state  them  squarely,  and  to  ask,  in  a  spirit 
of  fearless  comparison,  where  that  mood  is  likely  to 
bring  us  out. 

Any  one  can  see,  I  think,  that  the  realistic  spirit  is 
not  without  its  defects  and  dangers,  and  that  the  first 
among  these  is  the  danger  of  losing  the  sense  of  criti- 
cism of  life.  That  fiction,  to  deserve  its  place,  must 
be  in  some  sense  a  critical  test  of  values  in  reality,  in 
character  and  in  conduct,  I  must  hold  as  a  first  postu- 
late. Fiction  is  criticism  when  it  takes  sides,  as  satire 
does ;  fiction  is  criticism  when  it  fearlessly  and  impar- 
tially investigates  the  nature  of  life  and  society,  as 
modern  realism  does.     But  the  spirit  which  makes 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        167 

everything  in  the  world  seem  worth  investigation,  this 
indefatigable  modern  curiosity,  may  result  in  the  sub- 
stitution of  a  lesser  faculty  for  interpretative  criti- 
cism— the  lesser  faculty,  I  mean,  which  contents  itself 
with  reporting  the  existence  and  the  unnumbered  as- 
pects of  reality,  quite  forgetting  the  while  that  the 
tremendous  question  is  what  we  want,  what  we  need. 
The  patient  scrutiny  of  everything  in  the  field  of 
vision  may  result  at  length  in  a  curious  optical  de- 
fect; not  exactly  a  blurring  of  the  sight,  for  our  re- 
alist is  nearly  always  a  clear-eyed  person,  but  a  loss 
of  proportion  and  perspective.  In  short,  he  who  is 
interested  in  everything  and  intolerant  of  nothing 
tends  to  become  equally  interested  in  everything;  to 
make  actuality,  and  not  worth,  his  test  of  values. 
Some  of  us,  if  we  read  critically,  think  we  have  lately 
seen  the  love  of  reality  for  its  own  sake  pushed  to 
that  excess  where  it  defeats  the  meaning  of  reality. 
One  can  see  a  crowd  only  by  being  out  of  it;  and  one 
can  evaluate  the  masses  of  facts  in  a  novel  only  when 
one  knows  through  what  philosophical  window  one 
is  looking  at  them.  The  ' '  documenting, ' '  note-taking, 
data-gathering  novelist  who  says  to  us  simply: 
"These  things  are  so,  my  word  for  it:  make  what  you 
choose  of  them, ' '  is  giving  us  no  philosophical  window 
through  which  to  see  his  crowd;  and  if  our  critical 
sense  is  numbed  and  the  spectacle  becomes  for  us  a 
meaningless  pageant  of  the  real,  that  outcome  is  hardly 
to  be  wondered  at. 

This  loss  of  criticism  is  the  destiny  which  has  ob- 
viously overtaken  some  of  the  current  reputations  de- 


168  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

rived  simply  from  an  enormous  industry  in  observ- 
ing, an  enormous  skill  in  reporting.  And  I  see  a  con- 
sequence of  this  loss,  a  consequence  as  natural  as  it 
is  lamentable,  in  the  relative  disappearance  from  fic- 
tion of  great  and  likable  characters,  and  the  substi- 
tution of  weak,  unreal,  and  tawdry  characters.  Ed- 
itors of  literary  columns  have  developed  a  habit  of 
reminding  us  that  British  fiction  for  several  decades 
past  has  created  only  three  or  four  characters  who 
are  welcomed  into  the  common  stock  available  for 
popular  allusion — say,  Hardy's  Tess,  Kipling's  Mul- 
vaney,  and  Sherlock  Holmes.  I  am  far  from  sure 
that  this  is  an  intelligent  selection,  depending  as  it 
does  on  the  mere  counting  of  heads  over  a  very  short 
period  of  time ;  but  the  prevalence  of  the  elegiac  tone 
in  present  editorial  comments  on  the  characters  of 
fiction  is  at  least  evidence  that  the  novel  has  lost  some 
power  in  what  ought  to  be  its  chief  province.  There 
is  no  predicting  an  illustrious  or  even  a  safe  future 
for  the  novel  if  it  is  losing  the  art  of  criticism 
through  the  positive  and  unmistakable  bestness  of  its 
persona?. 

I  am  not  forgetting  that  I  previously  claimed 
for  the  novelist  his  privilege  of  treating  human 
weakness  and  degeneration ;  but  to  yield  any  palpa- 
ble reward  the  weakness  he  treats  should  be  the 
weakness  of  the  strong,  and  the  character  who  de- 
generates should  not  be  a  degenerate  character.  Let 
us  by  all  odds  have  intellectual  analysis;  but  first  of 
all  let  us  have  something  worth  analysing.  Too  often 
of  late  fiction  has  lost  its  sense  of  differences,  and  has 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        169 

not  only  treated  persons  who  are  infirm,  morbid,  or 
vicious,  but  has  treated  them  as  though  they  were  ad- 
mirable and  lovable.  The  novelist  has  become  so  ob- 
sessed by  the  vision  of  our  common  humanity  that  he 
has  lost  sight  of  all  those  differences  and  superiorities 
which  alone  make  humanity  deserve  consideration  in 
art.  The  biologist  in  the  laboratory  may  get  as  much 
out  of  a  polyp  as  out  of  a  monkey ;  but  the  novelist 
cannot  get  as  much  out  of  a  monkey  as  out  of  a  man. 
The  difference  is  that  the  scientist  is  working,  in  each 
experiment,  for  all  time,  adding  grain  of  sand  to  grain 
of  sand  in  his  task  of  building  out  the  shore  of 
knowledge  into  the  sea  of  ignorance;  whereas  the 
novelist  is  working  in  terms  of  books  which  are  them- 
selves complete  wholes,  and  must  separately  stand  or 
be  swept  away.  The  ideal  of  research,  without  reward 
in  the  present,  is  not  for  him ;  every  time  he  signs  his 
name  he  must  have  given  us  something  positive,  or  we 
find  no  meaning  in  his  work.  Let  him  recognize  the 
temporary  and  limited  conditions  of  his  craft,  and 
remember  that  fiction,  under  whatever  philosophy  or 
lack  of  philosophy,  is  truly  constructive  only  so  long 
as  it  criticizes  life  through  great  persons,  ideals  made 
liesh.  We  have  seen,  I  think,  that  the  realistic  equa- 
nimity is  on  the  whole  less  likely  to  create  great  char- 
acters than  was  the  older  philosophy  which  found 
room  for  intense  predilections  and  fierce  aversions. 

IV 

The  only  intelligible  reason  for  criticism  is  to  get 
things  improved  or  somehow  changed ;  and  behind  my 


170  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

general  assumption  that  literature  is  criticism  of  life 
is  an  implication  that  literature  has  something  to  do 
with  making  life  better.  I  raised  a  moment  ago,  and 
now  raise  again,  the  question  of  what  we  modern 
people  want.  I  suppose  that,  being  modern  people, 
we  want,  as  Mr.  Galsworthy  does,  more  of  the  feeling 
of  continuity — the  sense  of  universal  human  kinship 
as  we  look  upon  our  fellow  men  and  their  affairs,  the 
sense  of  cosmic  unity  as  we  contemplate  the  whole  of 
nature.  Mr.  Galsworthy  has  said  that,  to  gain  the 
feeling  of  continuity,  we  must  deny  ourselves  con- 
tempt, which  is  the  destruction  of  continuity.  "Well, 
then,  we  must  rejoice  at  whatever  tends  to  lessen  the 
number  of  things  which  evoke  contempt  from  the 
natural  human  heart — for  it  remains  wholly  improb- 
able that  the  human  heart  can  ever  be  reconstituted 
through  the  intellect.  Contempt  grows  by  what  it 
finds  to  feed  on;  and  the  one  chance  of  purging  the 
soul  of  hate  seems  to  be  through  destroying  hateful 
things — intolerance,  for  example — and  making  a  bet- 
ter world.  And  to  destroy  hateful  things,  it  is  prob- 
ably necessary  to  hate  them,  or  at  least  to  see  that 
they  are  hateful. 

Now,  here  we  come  to  still  another  implied  weak- 
ness in  the  realistic  spirit,  if  it  be  true  that  that 
spirit  means  loss  of  the  critical  sense.  The  realist 
would  destroy  hateful  things  by  persuading  himself 
that  they  are  not  hateful.  He  does  not  want  to  de- 
stroy ugliness  in  order  to  beautify  the  world ;  he  wants 
to  teach  the  soul  to  find  beauty  even  in  ugliness,  in 
order  to  beautify  the  soul.     And,  however  little  we 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        171 

may  like  to  admit  it,  we  must  see  that  this  surrender 
of  standards  and  aversions  is  essentially  weak,  sterile, 
and  static ;  at  least  it  is  and  must  be  so  over  any 
stretch  of  social  history  that  we  can  comprehend  in 
one  glimpse.  Our  coldly  intellectual  and  serene  mod- 
ern charity  simply  does  not  and  cannot  get  anything 
done.  It  is  the  fiction  of  satire  which  has  brought 
things  to  pass.  Why,  even  the  "unofficial  sentimen- 
talism,"  with  all  its  ignorance  and  bias,  has  done  more 
than  impartial  realism — witness  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin 
and  All  Sorts  and  Conditions  of  Men. 

The  truth  seems  to  be  that  only  violent  likes  and  dis- 
likes are  really  dynamic.  It  may  be  disheartening, 
but  it  is  certainly  probable,  that  animal  matter  reacts 
most  readily  and  decisively  to  antipathies  pointed  with 
scorn.  So  it  has  been,  and  is,  in  politics  and  re- 
ligion :  we  do  well  to  entertain  the  thought  that  it 
may  be  so  in  literature.  It  may  be  one  of  the  strange 
ironies  of  evolution  that  modern  man,  swayed  by  a 
passion  to  get  things  done,  has  grown  up  to  an  in- 
tellectual contempt  for  the  only  possible  means  of 
getting  anything  done.  Having  the  desire,  we  de- 
spise the  means — and  then  try  to  hide  our  impotence 
by  belittling  the  desire.  These  may  be  the  facts ;  and 
from  this  point  of  view  the  extreme  development  of 
the  impersonal  outlook  may  be  our  modern  nemesis — 
the  tragedy  of  indifferentism. 

Two  of  the  three  modern  artists  named  a  moment 
ago  furnish  some  evidence  of  the  lack  of  dynamic 
force  in  the  modern  gospel.  Mr.  Conrad  is  put  to 
some  pains  to  explain  that  his  resignation  is  not  in- 


172  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

difference;  that  he  wills  "what  the  gods  will"  just  as 
fervently  as  though  he  were  in  the  secret  of  what 
their  will  is.  And  Henry  James  was  frequently 
charged — very  authoritatively  by  Mr.  W.  C.  Brown- 
ell,1  for  example— with  having  no  interest  whatever 
in  his  characters  except  as  specimens,  or  in  life  except 
as  a  quarry  wherein  to  dig  specimens.  Nostromo  and 
Under  Western  Eyes  are  not  indifferent ;  nor  is  The 
Golden  Bowl  aridly  aesthetic.  But  the  modern  de- 
tachment which  is  so  patently  necessary  to  these  nov- 
els has  too  much  the  effect  of  making  both  writers 
over  to  a  very  specialized  part  of  the  public. 

Still  more  interesting  is  the  test  which  the  scientific 
posture  received  in  the  career  of  George  Gissing,  the 
first  British  novelist  of  considerable  eminence  to  turn 
fiction  into  sociology.  Gissing  wrote  about  cities, 
slums,  socialism,  conditions  of  labour,  the  problem  of 
illegitimacy,  economic  independence  for  women,  the 
education  of  the  poor,  and  a  host  of  other  such  mat- 
ters, and  wrote  about  them  from  first-hand  knowl- 
edge gained  through  the  enforced  privations  of  his 
own  thwarted  life.  Gissing  wrote  about  these  themes, 
not  because  he  had  them  at  heart,  and  certainly  not 
because  he  loved  or  believed  in  the  folk  whom  these 
themes  embraced,  but  because  the  facts  were  there 
and  he  knew  them.  Himself  by  instinct  a  classicist 
and  something  of  a  hedonist,  both  sensitive  to  beauty 
and  aloof  from  the  democratic  instincts  and  ideals, 
he  portrayed  the  sordid  surroundings  into  which  ac- 

i  Essay  on  Henry  James,  in  American  Prose  Masters.  By 
W.  C.  Brownell.     New  York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1909. 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        173 

cideut  had  forced  him,  and  wrote  one  novel  after  an- 
other, in  all  conscience  to  be  sure,  but  without  love 
and  without  hope,  saying  again  and  again,  in  effect, 
"I  show  you  things  that  are."  His  pseudo-biogra- 
pher says:  "The  essence  of  his  best  work  was  that 
it  was  founded  on  deep  and  accurate  knowledge  and 
keen  observation.  Its  power  lay  in  a  bent,  in  a  mood 
of  mind,  not  by  any  means  in  any  subject,  even 
though  his  satiric  discussion  of  what  he  called  the 
'ignobly  decent'  showed  his  strength,  and  indirectly 
his  inner  character.  His  very  repugnance  to  his 
early  subjects  led  him  to  choose  them."1 

Gissing  is  a  disciple,  almost  an  apostle,  of  the 
realistic  spirit.  Mr.  Chesterton,  in  his  life  of  Dickens, 
draws  the  obvious  comparison  between  the  effect  of 
the  underworld  as  Dickens  coloured  it  with  his  own 
fierce  hates  and  loves,  and  the  effect  of  that  same 
underworld  as  Gissing  portrayed  it  with  a  resignation 
akin  to  despair.  Gissing  was  a  brave  enough  man  to 
"look  on  with  undimmed  eyes,"  but  not  a  brave 
enough  man  to  hope  against  hope.  He  was  much  too 
scientific  for  that.  And  the  result  is  that  his  children 
of  apathy  and  of  futility  hardly  move  us  at  all,  hardly 
stir  the  heart  to  those  impulses  of  compassion  which 
result  in  disinterested  action ;  whereas  the  poor  of 
Dickens's  London  are  a  perpetual  delight  and  a  per- 
petual lesson  in  brotherhood.  It  is  Mr.  Chesterton's 
view  that  we  long  to  be  succouring  brothers  to  Dick- 
ens's poor  precisely  because  they  do  not  need  us  so 

'  The  Private  Life  of  Henry  Maitland,  A  Record  Dictated  by 
J.  H.  Revised  and  edited  bv  Morley  Roberts.  New  York: 
fieorge   H.   Doran   Co.     1912   "  P    309. 


L74  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

much  as  we  need  them ;  whereas  we  are  left  cold  and 
benumbed  by  Gissing's  outcasts  because  their  need 
is  so  much  greater  than  our  capacity  to  give.  In  the 
unscientific  optimism  of  Dickens,  the  difference  be- 
tween joy  and  despair  turns  on  a  smile  or  a  joke ;  in 
the  scientific  pessimism  of  Gissing,  there  is  nothing 
that  can  make  any  difference.  That  very  impartiality 
chills  us,  atrophies  the  will,  and  dries  at  their  source 
the  springs  of  pity.  Hardly  any  parallel  could  show 
more  succinctly  the  penalty  which  fiction  has  to  pay 
for  intellectual  poise,  when  that  poise  is  so  sustained 
as  to  resemble  indifference. 


I  am  aware  that  there  are  many  readers,  and  some 
critics,  to  whom  it  is  offensive  to  think  of  fiction  as 
having  any  such  function  as  I  have  here  ascribed  to 
it,  and  who  see  in  any  insistence  that  fiction  ought  to 
direct  the  will  and  inspire  it  nothing  more  than  a 
plea  for  crass  cloddish  didacticism.  Nor  do  I  recede 
by  a  step  from  my  own  position  in  relation  to  didacti- 
cism. I  maintain,  as  before,  that  fiction  must  be  dis- 
interested in  the  sense  of  telling  valuable  truth,  let 
what  will  come  of  it,  and  that  a  novel  which  stands 
or  falls  by  a  special  plea  for  or  against  something  is 
incurably  weak-kneed.  But  this  is  not  to  say  that  a 
novel  is  bad  because  it  rouses  a  burning  moral  in- 
dignation against  things  which  are  unquestionably 
wrong,  or  a  moral  passion  for  things  which  are  un- 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        175 


questionably  right.  If  any  member  of  "the  ineffable 
company  of  pure  aesthetes"  condemns  Nicholas  Nick- 
leby  because  it  had  a  reformatory  effect  on  English 
private  schools,  or  against  Hard  Cash  because  it 
called  attention  to  the  need  for  reform  in  English 
private  asylums  for  the  insane,  he  is  a  person  for 
whom  one  is  not  obliged  to  throw  away  one's  own 
conscience.  It  is  something  to  the  credit  of  the 
novel  if  it  can  show  why  vice  is  vicious,  and  do  justice 
to  the  virtue  of  vicious  characters ;  but  I  do  not  think 
this  achievement  is  comparable  to  that  of  the  novel 
which  fortifies  our  instinct  to  place  virtue  above  vice, 
kindness  above  cruelty,  and  discipline  above  lawless- 
ness. And  if  realism  must  go  on  seeing  primarily  the 
sameness  in  things  and  persons,  to  the  exclusion  of 
the  invaluable  differences,  then  it  were  a  thousand 
times  better  to  make  the  best  of  the  old  determined 
and  inflexible  dogmas  of  satire  at  its  most  dogmatic. 
But  all  this  is  in  criticism  of  the  realistic  spirit  as 
it  most  commonly  is,  not  as  it  might  be.  I  have 
named  some  of  the  defects  and  dangers  which  realism 
is  heir  to,  and  of  which  we  have  seen  it  the  frequent 
victim  during  the  past  two  decades.  But  there  is 
nothing  in  the  nature  of  realism  that  need  commit  it 
irrevocably  to  a  deadening  resignation,  lack  of  a  criti- 
cal interpretation  of  things,  and  weak  or  insignificant 
characters.  Interest  in  all  sides  of  life  is  in  itself  a 
great  good;  the  attempt  to  interpret  all  persons  as 
they  seem  to  themselves,  and  to  bring  all  reality  within 
the  radiated  warmth  of  the  social  emotions  of  sym- 
pathy and  compassion,  that  too  is  in  itself  a  great 


176  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

good.  The  man  who  is  interested  in  everything  does 
not  have  to  part  with  his  scale  of  values ;  great  genius 
can  go  into  the  murky  places  of  life  without  living 
there  perpetually,  and  without  forgetting  that  they 
are  murky.  And  when  the  realistic  spirit  produces 
its  great  individual  genius,  we  shall  see  the  great 
character  once  more  crowned  in  fiction;  for  the  crea- 
tion of  great  characters,  more  than  any  other  aspect 
of  fiction,  is  the  function  of  original  genius,  and  has 
next  to  nothing  to  do  with  an  author's  philosophy. 
Meredith's  doctrine  of  comedy  may  be  a  product  of 
Meredith's  social  philosophy,  but  Meredith's  Roy  Rich- 
mond is  the  product  simply  of  Meredith.  And  when 
fiction  has  another  Meredith  it  will  have  other  Roy 
Richmonds,  other  Sandras  and  Dianas  and  Clara 
Middletons — and  it  will  have  them  just  the  same, 
though  their  creator  be  a  theosophist  or  a  Mormon. 

It  was  not  my  intention  then  to  prove  that  realism 
can  never  escape  the  difficulties  which  beset  even 
realists  so  great  as  Henry  James  and  Conrad.  It  is 
well  to  state  roundly  and  emphatically  the  case  against 
realism,  and  to  name  the  worst  possible  eventuality. 
But  the  temptations  of  realism  are  not  necessarily  its 
downfall — and  besides,  there  remains  the  important 
question  whether  the  realistic  spirit  has  not  inherent 
potentialities  which  belong  to  the  creative  impulse 
in  no  other  form. 

This  question  I  can  answer  in  but  one  way.  The 
realist  does  have,  in  his  feeling  of  harmony  with  the 
world-purpose,  his  sense  of  oneness  with  all  creation, 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        177 

a  solid  philosophical  and  emotional  foundation  for  his 
art.  And  it  is  a  sort  of  foundation  which,  because 
it  implies  a  naturalistic  and  self-perpetuating  world, 
leaves  the  artist  most  free  for  those  facts  and  phases 
of  reality  which  mean  most  in  art ;  that  is,  he 
has  no  longer  to  be  the  conscious  servant  or  the  un- 
conscious slave  of  a  preordained  and  everlasting  law, 
and  all  his  care  may  be  for  the  artist's  proper  task,  to 
present  the  immediate  and  tangible  as  it  is  in  itself 
and  for  his  temperament. 

Moreover — and  this  second  consideration  is  still 
more  important — the  naturalistic  world  confers  upon 
the  artist  the  dignity  of  some  added  importance.  In 
the  world  of  orthodox  conception,  the  whole  was  un- 
changeable whatever  became  of  the  parts;  the  great 
facts  of  destiny  were  established  once  for  all.  In  the 
world  of  naturalism,  it  was  manifest  that  whatever 
came  to  pass  must  come  through  man's  own  efforts ;  if 
he  wanted  a  better  world,  he  must  make  it.  The  decay 
of  faith  means  the  rise  of  the  social  sciences.  The  fa- 
therhood of  God  meant  that  no  one  of  us  was  his 
brother's  keeper;  but  the  brotherhood  of  man  makes 
each  of  us  the  keeper  of  all.  And  the  novelist  has  felt 
this  new  responsibility.  He  has  turned  from  excep- 
tional and  unique  individuals  to  the  laws  of  society, 
the  individual  in  his  relation  to  his  age  and  his  group, 
the  intricate  problems  of  our  common  welfare. 
Something  of  this  is  what  Meredith  means  when  he 
says  that  "all  right  use  of  life  ...  is  to  pave  ways 
for  the  firmer  footing  of  those  who  succeed  us,"  and 


178  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

that  "the  novel,  exposing  and  illustrating  the  natural 
history  of  man,  may  help  us  to  such  sustaining  road- 
side gifts." 

Something  must  indeed  come  of  so  much  striving 
and  groping  and  piercing  of  the  veils  of  the  elder 
reticence.  It  is  unthinkable  that  all  this  conscience, 
this  selfless  and  unwearying  devotion  to  truth,  should 
come  to  naught.  The  means  may  be  slow,  but  the  end 
may  also  be  sure.  Perhaps  the  imperceptible  increase 
in  understanding,  in  appreciation  of  what  life  is  and 
calls  for,  may  result  in  great  and  svreeping  changes, 
in  which  fiction  shall  have  played  its  creditable  part. 
So  changes  do  come  about:  so  came,  for  example,  a 
long  sequence  of  developments  in  the  social  history 
of  woman,  in  which  perhaps  the  novel  has  not  been 
entirely  negligible.  The  realistic  spirit  has  done 
more  than  any  of  its  ancestors  for  the  diffusion  of 
high  merit  throughout  fiction ;  even  without  the  re- 
currence of  first-rate  individual  genius,  the  novel  is 
a  more  natural  instrument  for  the  propagation  of  ideas 
than  it  has  ever  been,  simply  because  it  has  put  so 
many  skilled  pens  to  work. 

We  shall  know  more  about  the  realistic  spirit  at  the 
end  of  another  decade ;  for,  as  a  world-spirit  in  the 
broadest  sense,  and  not  merely  as  an  agency  in  art,  it 
is  now  going  through  its  ordeal  by  fire.  In  the 
warring  countries  we  see  it  becoming  an  intellectual 
majority  in  such  men  as  Romain  Rolland  and  Ber- 
trand  Russell,  the  seers  of  a  new  and  greater  interna- 
tionalism, even  now  called  upon  to  bear  great  bur- 
dens of  hatred,  and  bear  them  with  equanimity  and 


THE     REALISTIC     SPIRIT        179 


self-possession  When  the  curtain  of  smoke  rises 
from  the  battlefields  of  this  war,  will  such  men  have 
shown  the  road  that  leads  away  from  the  hatreds  of 
the  past?  or  will  the  thing  that  has  proved  itself 
strong  enough  to  conquer  art  be,  for  some  generations 
yet,  too  weak  to  conquer  the  lives  of  nations  and 
enforce  a  new  gospel  of  goodwill  through  the  sense  of 
brotherhood  ? 


VII 


TRAGEDY   AND    COMEDY 


In  speaking  of  tragedy  and  comedy  as  elements 
which  have  something  to  do  with  the  purpose  and 
meaning  of  the  novel,  and  which  play  a  part  in  its 
evolution,  I  am  going  to  assume  the  common  distinc- 
tions and  differences  of  elementary  definition.  Any 
piece  of  fiction,  we  know  to  begin  with,  is  a  record 
of  struggle  between  opposed  forces — the  more  nearly 
equal  the  forces,  the  more  intense  the  struggle,  and 
therefore  the  more  appropriate  for  treatment  in  a 
work  of  art.  The  struggle  may  take  place  on 
a  high  moral  plane  or  a  low  physical  plane;  be- 
tween separate  persons  or  sets  of  persons,  or  be- 
tween different  elements  in  the  same  person ;  with 
or  without  the  motive  of  hatred;  in  fact,  either 
consciously  or  Unconsciously.  But  some  sort  of 
struggle  there  must  be.  And  we  call  the  result 
tragedy  if  the  forces  with  which  we  sympathize  are 
defeated,  comedy  if  those  forces  triumph.  Tragedy 
is  essentially  disaster  to  the  deserving,  comedy  essen- 
tially the  reward  of  the  deserving,  whether  through  the 
fulfilment  of  their  desires  or  otherwise.  Tragedy,  to 
be  completely  successful,  must  make  a  strong  appeal  to 
the  emotions  of  fear  and  sorrow.  But  the  converse  is 
not  true :  comedy  need  not  be  comic  in  the  sense  of 
moving  one  to  laughter. 

183 


184  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

In  some  such  way  as  this  we  may  state  the  simplest 
set  of  postulates  that  makes  any  adequate  intellectual 
(distinction  between  these  two  types  of  composition. 
But  once  we  have  laid  down  the  set  of  postulates  and 
got  the  distinction  made,  we  are  instantly  struck  by 
the  fact  that  the  conventions  which  distinguish  abso- 
lute comedy  from  absolute  tragedy  have  never  been 
so  marked  in  the  novel,  or  so  important,  as  they  have 
in  the  play.  The  novel,  we  know,  learned  its  tech- 
nique from  the  drama;  the  principal  Elizabethan 
novels  are  the  work  of  men  who  were,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  Lyly,  dramatists  primarily ;  and  Fielding, 
who  learned  a  great  deal  of  fictional  style  and  struc- 
ture from  Cervantes,  and  helped  make  the  novel  epic, 
learned  perhaps  still  more  from  his  long  and  prolific 
apprenticeship  to  dramaturgy,  and  may  be  said  to 
have  made  the  novel  dramatically  epic.  Yet  it  is 
true  that  most  great  plays  up  to  1800  are  quite 
squarely  either  tragedies  or  comedies,  whereas  most 
great  novels  of  the  same  period  tend  to  be  not  so 
definitively  either  one  or  the  other.  Or  if  this  is  an 
overstatement  of  the  fact,  at  least  it  is  true  that  there 
are  more  exceptions  to  the  technical  difference  in 
fiction  than  in  drama.  And  after  1837  the  sharpness 
of  the  distinction  quite  disappears  from  the  novel; 
plays,  what  plays  there  are,  remain  one  thing  or  the 
other,  but  novels  tend  to  become  a  mingling  of  both. 
Why  is  it,  one  is  prompted  to  ask,  that  the  novel, 
which  learned  its  rudiments  from  the  play,  should 
have  gone  farther  than  the  play  toward  abolishing 
the     hard-and-fast     distinctions?     Why     especially 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        185 

should  there  have  been  so  few  pure  tragedies  in  fic- 
tion? 

I  find  a  tentative  answer  to  the  second  of  these 
questions  in  the  fact  that  the  novelist's  audience  al- 
most necessarily  consists  of  one  person  at  a  time,  or  at 
least  of  one  person  in  a  place,  whereas  the  dramatist's 
audience  consists  of  many  persons  simultaneously  in 
one  place.  The  physical  process  of  novel-reading  is 
solitary;  that  of  enjoying  a  play  is  social.  And  it 
seems  on  the  whole  to  be  true  that,  although  every  ex- 
treme of  emotion  is  intensified  when  we  share  it,  so  that 
all  emotion  is  potentially  socializing,  still  we  can  bear 
to  laugh  in  solitude  more  easily  than  to  cry  in  solitude. 
We  can  feel  happy  alone ;  but  when  we  sorrow,  we 
instinctively  crave  the  support  of  a  whole  social 
fabric  made  up  of  sorrow,  of  which  our  grief  is  only 
one  thread.  It  is  quite  possible  that  if  novels  were 
habitually  enjoyed  as  works  to  be  read  aloud  to  vast 
numbers  of  hearers,  they  might  have  a  quite  different 
emotional  tradition.  It  may  be  so ;  the  conjecture 
is  at  least  of  some  passing  interest. 

But  this  is  only  a  tentative  explanation  of  some 
things  in  the  past ;  it  is  certainly  inadequate  to  explain 
the  breaking  down  of  the  distinction  between  tragedy 
and  comedy  in  modern  drama  itself.  I  think  perhaps 
the  habit  of  reading  in  solitude  did  produce  originally 
the  well-recognized  demand  for  "happy  endings"  in 
stories ;  but  that  explanation  certainly  cannot  reach 
beyond  the  date  at  which  the  drama  begins  to  choose 
other  endings  than  the  flatly  tragic  and  flatly  comic. 
Nor  do  I  think  this  phenomenon  in  the  drama  results 


186  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

from  the  fact  that  the  drama,  after  a  long  period  of 
insignificance,  begins  for  the  first  time  to  learn  from 
the  novel,  thus  reversing  the  former  process. 

No:  the  disappearance  of  tragedy  and  comedy  in 
their  pure  state,  both  on  and  off  the  stage,  is  a  symp- 
tom of  some  larger  tendency  at  work  in  everything — 
in  life  as  well  as  art.  If  the  question  were  of  art 
alone,  we  might  conjecture  that  the  novel,  as  the 
longer  and  more  leisured  of  the  two  forms,  is  auto- 
matically freer  to  present  the  mingled  good  and  evil, 
sadness  and  joy,  of  life;  and  that  the  play,  as  the 
more  compact  and  selective  form,  has  to  go  farther 
toward  artificial  exclusion  and  emotional  unity.  But, 
as  I  say,  all  such  explanations  show  themselves  inade- 
quate when  drama  begins  to  follow  the  same  tendency. 
The  fact  is,  there  is  a  general  loss  of  emotional  finality 
all  through  art;  poetry  and  painting,  as  well  as  fic- 
tion and  drama,  try  much  less  hard  than  formerly  to 
produce  the  pure  extremes  of  emotion,  and  much 
harder  to  produce  the  complex  intermediate  emotions. 
I  have  already  pointed  out  that,  generally  speaking, 
emotion  becomes  proportionately  less  important  in 
literature  and  intellectual  analysis  more  important. 
The  loss  of  pure  tragedy  and  comedy  is  part  of  this 
tendency — for  the  deeper  analysis  goes,  the  less  con- 
tent can  it  be  with  emotional  finality  of  any  sort ;  the 
more  it  sees  that  any  pretence  of  finality  is  counter 
to  the  nature  of  reality. 

The  important  point  about  both  the  tragic  ending 
and  the  comic  ending  is  that  they  are  endings,  full 
stops;  whereas  in  life  there  is  no  "finis"  at  the  foot 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        187 

of  the  page — even  death  is  a  full  cadence  for  but  one 
person,  and  all  the  interests  and  issues  of  which  he 
was  a  part  go  on  practically  without  interruption. 
Life  is  always  re-creating  itself  out  of  the  past,  per- 
petuating the  residua  of  old  things  in  new  shapes, 
and  denying  the  beholder  any  sort  of  conclusiveness 
whatever.  And  art,  if  it  is  to  suggest  the  nature  of 
life  so  analysed,  must  attach  less  and  less  importance 
to  beginnings  and  endings,  more  and  more  importance 
to  what  comes  between  them.  Indeed,  everything 
does  come  between  them:  the  only  real  beginning  is 
the  beginning  of  the  world,  the  only  real  ending  is  the 
end  of  time.  Since  the  conditions  under  which  the 
artist  works  prevent  these  from  being  "copy,"  he 
gets  along  with  a  segment  cut  out  from  somewhere 
between,  and  frankly  recognizes  that  it  is  a  segment, 
and  not  a  whole. 


II 


Suppose  we  undertake  first  to  look  with  some  par- 
ticularity into  the  reasons  for  the  disappearance  of 
absolute  tragedy  in  the  novel. 

It  is  obvious  that  the  analytic  mood  which  I  have 
called  the  realistic  spirit  is  more  interested  in  the 
reasons  for  human  failure  than  in  the  mere  fact  of 
failure;  for  the  realistic  spirit  is  essentially  the  in- 
quiring spirit  that  wants  to  understand  the  nature 
and  hidden  significance  of  acts  and  their  obscure  con- 
sequences. Now,  this  fact  imposes  upon  the  realistic 
procedure,  at  the  outset,  a  limitation  which   denies 


188  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

the  very  nature  of  tragedy  and  comedy.  You  can 
give  your  undivided  emotional  sympathy  to  a  person 
engaged  in  an  effort  to  attain  a  certain  object  or 
ideal :  you  can  joy  in  his  success  or  sorrow  in  his  fail- 
ure, as  comedy  and  tragedy  call  upon  you  to  do.  But 
you  cannot  give  your  emotional  sympathy,  or  any 
part  of  it,  to  a  reason  for  anything.  A  reason  is  just 
something  that  is  so;  it  has  no  more  emotional  im- 
plications in  it  than  the  binomial  theorem.  Fiction 
written  in  the  scientific  spirit,  then,  transfers  the 
appeal  very  largely  from  the  heart  to  the  head ;  the 
emotional  elements  may  be  present,  but  the  accent  is 
not  at  all  on  their  emotionality.  Most  of  the  emo- 
tions present  in  fiction  of  the  last  quarter  century 
exist  as  facts  to  be  understood, — that  is,  as  experi- 
ences of  the  characters, — not  as  effects  to  be  felt. 
This  would  remain  true  even  if  scientific  fiction  dealt 
in  absolutely  sharp  beginnings  and  conclusive  end- 
ings; the  endings  would  still  not  be  tragic  or  comic, 
because  they  would  not  be  resorted  to  for  the  sake  of 
making  us  feel  deeply  about  them.  Fiction  parts 
company  with  tragedy  and  comedy  just  in  so  far  as 
it  transfers  its  province  from  feeling  to  thought. 

But  of  course  modern  realistic  fiction  does  not  keep 
the  finality  either,  any  more  than  it  does  the  emotion. 
It  cuts  out  its  segment  of  life  in  such  a  way  that  as 
much  as  possible  of  the  whole  may  be  represented, 
and  makes  its  intensive  analysis  of  that  segment  for 
the  sake  of  its  bearing  on  the  whole.  It  is  hardly 
necessary  to  remind  ourselves  again  that  the  realistic 
spirit  is  the  outcome  of  seeing  life  as  an  organic  and 


TRAGEDY     AND     COMEDY        189 

evolutionary  unit,  or  that  the  modern  sense  of  things 
is  the  sense  of  "living  in  the  whole,"  as  John  Ad- 
dington  Symonds  finely  phrased  it.  Now,  it  is  ob- 
vious that  there  can  be  no  tragedy  for  the  whole. 
The  novelists  of  an  elder  generation  tried,  often 
with  immense  success,  to  rouse  the  feeling  that  the 
world  revolved  for  their  few  chosen  men  and  women ; 
when  the  book  was  over,  the  world  stopped.  On  lay- 
ing down  the  book,  one  walked  about  for  hours  in  a 
daze,  until  life  could  assert  itself  and  make  things 
real  again.  One  was  made  to  feel  temporarily  that 
the  fortunes  of  those  few  men  and  women  were 
everything ;  they  were  given  to  us  for  their  own  sake. 
No  one  experiences  anything  of  that  sensation  on  read- 
ing the  characteristic  modern  novels.  They  fortify  in 
us  the  feeling  that  life  goes  on  just  the  same — the  life 
of  which  the  characters  make  a  part,  and  for  the  sake 
of  which  they  are  called  upon  to  exist.  Whatever 
happens  to  them,  nothing  much  happens  to  the  world : 
it  is  the  same  world,  except  that,  if  the  novelist  has 
served  us  well  in  his  own  chosen  way,  we  know  it  a 
little  better.  You  cannot  get  the  sense  of  complete 
tragedy  out  of  a  contemplation  of  lives  presented  as 
part  of  human  society,  whatever  happens  to  those 
lives ;  because  society  is  safe,  and  beyond  the  reach  of 
ultimate  tragedy.  Society  is,  to  all  human  intents 
and  purposes,  immortal. 

Really,  then,  there  can  hardly  be  any  such  thing 
as  a  tragedy  written  from  the  modern  point  of  view, 
with  the  emphasis  on  society,  unless  it  is  written  by 
a  pessimist.    The  pessimist,  who  sees  the  good  in  man 


190  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

as  mortal,  the  evil  in  the  world  as  immortal,  can 
represent  the  good  as  extinguished,  decisively  and 
irretrievably,  by  the  evil,  as  Mr.  Hardy  does  in  his 
almost  insupportable  last  novel,  Jude  the  Obscure. 
But  mark:  even  that  is  not  quite  bona  fide  tragedy: 
for  authentic  tragedy  always  tacitly  appeals  to 
our  feeling  that  the  triumph  of  evil  over  good  is  an 
abnormality,  a  monstrous  perversion;  it  evokes  a  re- 
bellious grief.  And  pessimism  makes  that  abnormal- 
ity normal,  an  expression  of  the  world-principle  as 
the  pessimist  interprets  it;  and  the  properly  tragic 
emotion  shrivels  from  rebellion  to  a  numbed  and  help- 
less grief.  Pessimism  in  modern  art  invariably  de- 
feats itself,  as  a  point  of  view  available  to  art,  by 
turning  thus  into  morbidity.  It  gives  us  nothing  of 
the  equality  which  is  essential  to  the  tragic  struggle; 
the  disaster  is  predestined. 

On  the  whole  the  modern  spirit,  except  when  pessi- 
mistic, is  much  too  broadly  analytical  to  see  any  in- 
dividual human  failure  as  unrelieved  and  hopeless,  or 
any  evil  without  its  interpenetration  of  good.  And 
most  of  the  characters  who  fail  in  modern  fiction 
achieve  in  doing  so  some  kind  of  success  which  out- 
weighs the  failure — if  not  for  themselves,  then  for 
others.  The  best  modern  novels  follow  Dr.  Johnson's 
philosophy  of  the  vanity  of  human  wishes:  we  may 
not  get  out  of  life  exactly  what  we  are  trying  for, 
and  we  certainly  do  not  get  what  we  first  began  by 
wishing,  but  we  may  get  something  potentially  worth 
much  more.     Silas  Lapham,  the  pivotal  character  of 


TRAGEDY     AND     COMEDY        191 


the  great  American  novel  (which,  like  many  things 
we  are  always  anticipating,  is  to  be  sought  in  the 
past),  fails  in  his  business,  sees  his  new  house  burn 
down,  and  knows  that  his  own  short-sighted  folly  is 
chargeable  with  the  whole  sum  of  disaster;  he  is  a 
broken  and  disappointed  man,  who  will  never  be 
whole  again.  But  at  the  same  time  he  has  recovered 
the  faith  of  his  wife,  the  love  of  his  daughters,  and  a 
kind  of  self-respect  which  he  had  begun  to  lose  in  the 
intricate  chicaneries  of  high  finance ;  and  Mr.  Howells 
shows  him  to  us  at  the  last  making  the  best  of  being 
on  simplified  terms  with  life  and  with  himself — at 
least  knowing  his  own  heart  as  he  had  not  done,  and 
willing  to  believe  that  "nothing  can  be  thrown  quite 
away ;  and  it  can 't  be  that  our  sins  only  weaken  us. ' ' 
The  partial  success  brought  out  by  the  partial  fail- 
ure, the  moral  or  spiritual  gain  wrested  from  the  ma- 
terial or  physical  loss — this  is  the  objective  of  most 
modern  fiction  that  is  worth  discussing.  No  disaster 
is  complete  so  long  as  there  is  this  to  be  got  out  of  it. 
"Living  in  the  whole"  and  seeing  the  remoter  im- 
plications of  one's  acts  means  that  failures  in  them- 
selves desperate  and,  by  the  older  philosophy,  irre- 
trievable are  to  be  read  as  prefaces  to  hope — the 
travail  of  our  collective  life  as  it  struggles  to  bring 
forth  some  community  of  good,  or  the  growing  pains 
of  rebellious  youth  in  its  slow  and  painful  discovery 
of  what  life  is. 


192  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 


III 

The  conventions  of  comedy  have  remained  on  the 
whole  stronger  in  the  novel  than  those  of  tragedy, 
just  as  comedies  have  remained  more  numerous  than 
tragedies;  but  those  conventions  too  have  declined  as 
the  sense  of  finality  weakened  in  our  contemplation  of 
life,  and  they  may  be  said  now  to  have  vanished  al- 
together. The  Victorian  novel  tended  to  conclude,  as 
Professor  Winchester  has  put  it,  with  "sugared  mari- 
tal felicity,  with  'God  bless  you,  my  children,'  and 
ten  thousand  a  year"  ;x  but  more  and  more  there  grew 
upon  the  novelist  a  perception  that  life  is  disillusion, 
and  books  like  David  Copper  field  and  Bleak  House, 
Vanity  Fair  and  Pendennis  show  us  in  the  last  chap- 
ter persons  who  have  both  gained  and  lost  something 
as  they  tried  to  cope  with  life;  persons  who  have 
known  defeat  and  futility,  who  have  renounced  and 
outgrown,  and  who  can  see  that  life  has  been  on  the 
whole  good.  But  the  comedy  of  manners  does  cling 
until  astonishingly  late  to  its  pretence  that  the  story 
is  all  told  when  the  last  page  is  turned.  The  end  of 
the  book  is  the  end  of  the  character. 

Partly,  of  course,  this  effect  is  produced  by  the 
old  convention  that  success  in  love,  crudely  denoted 
by  an  engagement  ring  or  a  marriage  license,  is  the 
triumphal  apex  of  any  life,  and  that  after  the  hero 
has  "won"  the  heroine  their  careers  cease  to  be  of 
interest.     This    convention    has    pretty    well    clisap- 

i/Sorae  Principles  of  Literary  Criticism,  p.  299.  By  C.  T. 
Winchester.     New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co.     1899. 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        193 

peared  now;  success  in  getting  married  no  longer  is 
assumed  to  mean  success  in  marriage;  and  success  in 
marriage  is  our  modern  definition  of  success  in  love. 
The  disappearance  of  this  romantic  illusion  about 
love  has  been  exceedingly  good  for  fiction  in  one  way : 
it  has  increased  the  age,  hence  the  maturity,  hence 
the  interest,  of  the  characters,  and  by  so  doing  has 
made  its  picture  of  life  less  overbalanced  by  the 
sentimental.  But,  as  I  say,  the  convention  of  the 
sentimental  ending,  with  its  absolute  finality,  did 
persist  surprisingly  long;  and  to  this  day  one  can 
find  new  novels  in  which  the  last  two  pages  line  all  the 
characters  up,  just  before  the  ultimate  curtain  falls, 
in  a  neat  semi-circle  across  the  stage,  each  ready  with 
a  tabloid  version  of  his  whole  future  life  before  he 
takes  his  leave  of  the  reader  with  a  bow.  So  long  as 
the  novel  kept  to  this  meticulous  habit  of  accounting 
for  everybody  and  all  his  relations,  and  exhausting 
the  subject  of  what  happened  to  whom,  the  charac- 
ters necessarily  assumed  the  relation  of  entertainers, 
not  that  of  fellow-men.  Any  one  can  see  the  superi- 
ority, if  only  on  grounds  of  verisimilitude,  of  the 
custom  which  lets  a  character,  when  he  has  served  his 
purpose  to  the  story,  simply  drop  out  of  it,  as  persons 
drop  out  of  our  lives;  and  which  allows  us  to  leave 
the  major  personages  as  folk  who  may  still  live  on  and 
go  about  their  business— folk  whom,  for  all  we  know 
to  the  contrary,  we  may  meet  again  somewhere,  as  we 
so  often  meet  the  characters  of  Trollope. 

Whatever  the  persistence  of  the  comic  conventions, 
one  can  see,  I  think,  that  they  are  gradually  forced 


194  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

downward  into  the  popular  sentimentalisni,  out  of 
artistically  conscientious  fiction;  for  the  same  set  of 
logical  considerations  which  applies  to  tragedy  governs 
comedy  as  well,  and  the  realistic  view  of  life  is  the 
death  of  either.  If  life  is  a  mingled  affair  of  profit 
and  loss,  why  should  its  counterfeit  presentment  strike 
a  balance  all  on  one  side  of  the  ledger  ?  The  form  of 
comedy  is  too  symmetrical,  too  neat  in  its  efficient 
disposal  of  everything,  to  mirror  that  life  in  which 
nothing  is  independently  so,  in  which  all  things  are 
interdependent.  The  democratic  feeling  of  solidarity, 
the  vision  of  a  common  destiny  and  an  indefeasible 
community  of  interest,  forbids  us  lightly  to  compute 
reality  in  terms  of  individual  successes.  The  same 
logic  which  refuses  to  see  anything  as  absolute  failure 
in  relation  to  the  whole,  refuses  to  see  anything  as 
absolute  success.  And  as  life  intensifies  and  rein- 
forces in  us,  through  experience  and  observation,  the 
sense  of  its  own  inconclusiveness,  comedy  tends  to  de- 
generate into  pure  farce,  which,  having  little  or  no 
representative  value,  may  be  dismissed  as  purely 
decorative,  and  therefore  as  having  nothing  to  do  with 
this  discussion  of  purposes  and  meanings. 

On  the  whole,  I  think  we  may  say  that  the  hope  of 
a  school  of  really  sufficient  modern  comedy  is  so 
fantastically  remote  as  to  rank  among  the  impossibili- 
ties. For  only  one  thinkable  condition  of  things  could 
produce  such  a  comedy :  a  practically  perfect  society, 
such  as  Meredith  foresaw.  In  such  a  society,  there 
would  be  no  loss  and  no  waste ;  the  good  of  one  would 
be  the  good  of  all,  and  every  defeat  of  something  by 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        195 


something  else  would  be  equally  a  victory  for  both. 
Of  such  community  of  interest,  we  have  now  only  the 
vision.  The  crucial  happenings  take  the  form  of 
contests  between  things  and  interests  so  different  that 
every  gain  somewhere  means  loss  somewhere  else, — 
contests  of  class,  of  race,  of  power,— and  in  all  these 
there  is  at  least  an  undercurrent  of  the  tragic.  This 
the  modern  observer  of  life  must  feel  and  see,  if  he  is 
truly  to  communicate  anything  to  us.  Not  for  him, 
not  for  us  ever  again,  perhaps,  the  old  artificial  sim- 
plifications of  unmitigated  tragedy  and  comedy. 


IV 

The  new  fashion  in  endings  makes  all  fiction  stop, 
as  the  short  story  is  recommended  to  begin,  in  medias 
res.  To  appreciate  the  difference  of  fashions  through 
one  of  its  trivial  manifestations,  compare  the  clos- 
ing paragraphs  of  half  a  dozen  novels  by  Dickens 
with  those  of  half  a  dozen  by  Mr.  Hardy.  And 
the  point,  small  though  it  is  when  taken  by  itself, 
is  indicative  of  the  real  change  which  has  come  over 
the  artist's  attitude  toward  life.  "Begin  at  the  be- 
ginning, set  everything  in  order,  and  end  when  you 
are  through"— thus  the  old  rationale  of  composition, 
a  sacrosanct  formula.  But  the  modern  artist  de- 
spairs of  beginnings  and  endings;  to  him  everything 
is  middle;  he  is  quite  without  the  sense  that  every 
drama  can  be  played  up  to  the  ultimate  curtain,  and 
that  to  stage  it  is  an  easy  thing ;  and  this  is  the  rea- 


196  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


son  for  his  abandonment  of  the  old  conclusive  end- 
ings which  make  tragedy  and  comedy,  and  for  his 
adoption  of  the  novel  or  play  as  being,  in  the  words 
of  an  overworked  phrase,  a  "slice  of  life." 

Now,  it  is  a  very  simple  affair  to  say  that  a  piece 
of  fiction  should  be  a  piece  of  life,  and  that  it  should 
pretend  to  no  completeness  which  life  does  not  pos- 
sess ;  but  it  is  another  and  much  more  involved  thing 
to  make  it  fulfil  these  conditions.  To  begin  with, 
it  implies  that  impersonality  in  the  contemplation  of 
life  can  actually  be  carried  to  that  pitch  where  the 
artist  understands  things  as  they  are,  absolutely  with- 
out any  personal  bias  for  one  kind  of  thing  as  against 
another,  and  without  colouring  anything  with  the 
tones  of  his  own  temperament.  The  realist's  effort 
is,  of  course,  to  suppress  himself  and  let  life  speak 
for  itself;  his  technique  is  indeed  objective.  But, 
in  this  utter  and  abysmal  philosophical  sense,  it  is 
exceedingly  doubtful  whether  there  is  any  such  thing 
as  objectivity.  Professor  Warner  Fife  has  some 
profitable  remarks  on  this  point: 

"As  I  prefer  to  put  it,  realism  stands  for  denatured 
human  experience.  For  without  denying  that  some- 
thing is  meant  by  an  unvarnished  fact,  it  strikes  me 
that  the  phrase  as  it  stands  expresses  a  contradiction 
in  terms.  I  may  distinguish  the  fact  as  presented  in 
your  varnish  from  the  fact  as  it  appears  to  me,  and 
thus,  by  allowing  for  your  varnish  and  for  mine, 
procure  for  the  fact  some  measure  of  independence. 
But  a  fact  without  any  varnish  whatever  seems  to 
me,  if  facts  are  to  be  related  to  perception,  to  be  no 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY       197 

i 

fact  at  all ;  and  how  the  world  is  to  be  described  from 
nobody's  point  of  view,  I  cannot  imagine.  When  I 
try  to  state  facts  in  this  fashion  I  find  myself  in  dif- 
ficulty. The  chair,  for  example,  is  the  favourite 
philosophical  illustration  of  a  very  solid  fact.  Yet 
when  I  attempt  to  describe  the  chair,  I  am  confronted 
at  once  by  arms,  legs,  seat,  and  back — terms  that  ex- 
press a  human  prejudice ;  and  when  I  try  to  dehuman- 
ize my  description,  I  seem  to  find  no  terms  that  would 
make  the  chair  recognizable,  none  that  do  not  seem 
to  transform  a  familiar  human  fact  into  something 
rather  'metaphysical.' 

"And  if  it  be  objected  that  my  way  of  knowing, 
or  of  describing,  the  chair  leaves  the  real  chair  un- 
touched, then  I  am  compelled  to  wonder  what  that 
particular  reality  would  be  in  a  world  that  knew  noth- 
ing of  chairs — in  a  primitive  world,  for  example, 
where  every  one  squatted.  Something  real,  I  do  not 
doubt ;  yet  still  something  intelligible,  intelligible  now 
from  the  standpoint  of  primitive  life.  If  an  automo- 
bile would  cease  to  be  an  automobile  in  a  world  with- 
out carburetors,  I  cannot  see  how  it  could  remain  an 
automobile  in  a  world  without  chauffeurs.  When  I 
try  to  conceive  what  that  reality  would  be  which  is 
wholly  unaltered  by  being  known — to  distinguish 
what  the  chair  is  in  itself  from  what  it  becomes  when 
known  to  be  a  chair,  the  cold  fact  from  the  humanly 
familiar  and  effective  fact — I  seem  to  find  nothing 
but  that  metaphysical,  atomic  chair — the  chair  as 
varnished  by  the  scientific  point  of  view — which  is 
not  'really'  a  chair  and  is  only  doubtfully  known. 


198  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


"It  seems,  then,  that  to  be  a  realist  is  not  so  simple 
a  task  as  it  appears.  We  live  in  a  world  which  we 
have  surely  not  originated,  a  real  and  not  a  merely 
imaginary  world;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  we  live  in 
a  world  which,  just  in  being  real,  is  more  or  less  fa- 
miliar and  (strangely)  more  or  less  responsive  to 
our  efforts,  and  which,  in  its  familiarity  and  respon- 
siveness, reflects  at  every  point  our  human  point  of 
view.  In  a  word,  the  real  world,  for  philosophy  as 
well  as  for  literature,  is  the  fruit  of  a  transaction 
between  two  parties;  and  a  realism  in  which  either 
of  the  parties  is  ignored  is  a  mere  pseudo-realism."  1 

So  that  when  the  artist  looks  at  what  he  calls  "the 
facts  of  life,"  he  is  looking  at  a  congeries  of  facts 
as  seen  by  him;  and,  having  seen  them  at  all,  he  can 
no  more  keep  himself  out  of  them  than  he  can  see  the 
back  of  his  own  head  without  a  mirror.  The  relations 
between  and  among  them,  those  relations  which  are 
all-important  to  art,  are  the  relations  which  he  sees. 
We  do  well  to  keep  these  facts  in  mind  when  we  talk 
about  "pure"  realism,  absolute  "objectivity." 

But  if  realism  in  this  fundamental  sense  is  impos- 
sible, it  does  not  follow  that  it  is  impossible  for  the 
artist  to  try  for  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  channel 
of  fiction  in  the  last  thirty  years  is  given  a  quite  new 
turn  by  his  persistent  ingenuity  in  trying  for  it ;  and 
in  the  process  the  novelist,  unless  he  has  the  clearest 
notion  of  his  own  limitations  as  an  observer  of  life, 
is  especially  subject  to  two  dangers  arising  through 

i  The  Rejection  of  Consciousness,  New  York  Nation,  Vol. 
101,  No.  2635,  p.  773. 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        199 

the  inability  of  mere  observation  to  do  what  is  asked 
of  it. 

To  begin  with,  there  is  always  the  danger  that  a 
piece  of  art  which  purports  to  be  a  slice  of  life  merely, 
will  quite  miss  achieving  a  design  in  the  artistic 
sense;  will  have  no  pattern  except  a  single  observer's 
experience.  And  that  is  assuredly  not  enough  unity 
for  the  work  of  art;  otherwise,  a  stroll  up  Forty- 
Second  Street  in  the  crowded  hours,  if  one  kept  one's 
eyes  open,  would  be  a  work  of  art.  Many  novels,  and 
more  and  more  plays,  of  the  last  two  decades  seem  to 
work  toward  the  ideal  of  replacing  subject-matter  by 
mere  matter;  the  ideal  of  summing  up  life  one  fact 
after  another,  as  science  sums  up  the  world  of  matter 
and  force,  instead  of  representing  life  by  facts 
chosen  for  their  representative  value.  And  the  re- 
sult is  inevitably  inartistic  shapelessness.  There  can 
be  no  art  without  some  form  other  than  that  arising 
from  the  mere  juxtaposition  of  facts  and  events  in 
real  life;  because  art  is,  almost  by  definition  and  cer- 
tainly by  the  nature  of  its  appeal,  a  selecting  and 
sifting  process. 

But  this  is  not  so  serious  as  one  of  its  implications, 
the  second  danger  of  which  I  spoke.  If  art  be  with- 
out a  pattern,  and  remain  shapeless  except  in  so  far 
as  it  gives  the  artist's  report  of  things  which  oc- 
curred together  in  factuality,  then  it  will  quite  have 
failed  to  be  a  criticism  of  life;  that  is,  to  have  any 
centre  of  purpose  or  meaning  at  all.  It  will  be  simply 
life  beheld  at  one  remove,  and  not  illumined.  The 
novelist  will  be  supplying  material  which  he  himself 


200  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

does  not  know  how  to  interpret.  If  he  is  baffled  by 
his  own  copy, — we  can  hardly  call  it  a  creation,  for 
the  creator  knows  what  his  creatures  exist  for, — 
wherewithal  shall  we  be  enlightened? 

For  these  two  reasons  primarily,  I  am  afraid  we 
shall  have  to  admit  that  the  "slice-of-life"  method 
is  greater  in  its  claims  than  in  its  fulfilment;  espe- 
cially when  we  remind  ourselves  again  that  the  novel- 
ist, whatever  his  intention,  cannot  possibly  give  us  a 
story  which  is  a  slice  of  life  and  nothing  else.  The 
net  result  of  this  ideal  is  to  suppress  the  elements  of 
choice  and  accent  which  are  the  postulates  of  art,  and 
to  blur  and  perhaps  defeat  the  purpose  which  the 
artist,  by  virtue  of  his  being  a  conscious  entity  at  all, 
cannot  help  having,  even  if  he  does  not  know  that 
he  has  it.  In  undertaking  to  suppress  his  own  philo- 
sophy, he  undertakes  what  no  one  can  perform;  be- 
cause our  philosophy  is  the  window  through  which 
we  have  to  see  everything.  Moreover,  if  he  undertake 
to  do  that,  he  will  deprive  his  work  of  what  does  most 
to  justify  its  existence;  for  it  is  his  province  to  re- 
create life  in  shapes  which  will  show  his  considered 
interpretation  of  it.  To  say  that  he  has  no  opinion, 
or  that  his  opinion  means  nothing,  is  to  confess  mere 
disintegration  and  failure. 


Among  the  perplexities  and  dilemmas  which  attend 
realism,  it  is  not  altogether  to  be  wondered  at  if  the 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY       201 

novelist  flounders,  uncertain  of  his  way.  It  is  easy 
enough  to  adjure  him  to  have  faith;  it  is  easy  enough 
to  point  out  to  him  that  in  the  spiritual  history  of 
mankind  faith  has  accomplished  more  than  knowl- 
edge; it  is  easy  enough  to  say  that  what  we  need  is 
a  renascence  of  the  "will  to  believe."  And  it  is  un- 
doubtedly true  that  there  are  many  invaluable  lessons 
for  the  modern  practitioner  of  fiction  in  the  sharply 
tragic  or  comic  versions  of  life  which  make  up  the 
history  of  the  novel.  But  every  such  plea  fails  to 
recognize  the  difficulty  of  the  modern  situation  in  its 
play  on  the  modern  mind.  The  modern  mind  knows 
too  much  to  throw  away  what  it  knows  merely  in 
order  to  believe  something  that  it  would  like  to  be- 
lieve. 

Moreover — and  this  is  an  incomparably  more  im- 
portant point — we  are  developing  a  temperament  that 
loves  reality,  that  finds  it  sufficient  and  swims  and 
floats  in  it  and  is  buoyed  up  by  it  as  by  faith.  It 
seems  to  me  unthinkable — though  "unthinkable"  is  a 
very  large  word,  and  many  unthinkable  things  have 
come  to  pass — that  the  modern  artist  can  experience 
any  change  of  heart  or  of  mind  which  shall  result  in 
his  picturing  life  as  a  thing  that  comes  out  even,  with 
so  much  happiness  dealt  out  there,  and  so  much  retri- 
bution here,  to  every  man  according  to  his  desert. 
I  do  not  see  what  hope  we  dare  cherish  of  a  future 
in  which  the  outcome  of  things  shall  be  determinate 
instead  of  indeterminate;  and  until  that  future  comes 
I  do  not  see  how  we  can  ask  the  realist  so  far  to 
abandon  reality  as  to  depict  things  as  happening  the 


202  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


way  he  would  like  them  to,  not  the  way  they  do  hap- 
pen. It  seems  from  this  angle  preposterous  to  ask 
the  novelist  to  invoke  any  forces  except  those  intri- 
cate ones  which  he  sees  humanly  operative  in  the 
naturalistic  world  about  him ;  forces  which,  so  far  as 
he  can  study  them,  achieve  first  of  all  the  perpetuation 
of  life  and  consciousness,  and  then  the  evolution  of 
certain  social  ideals  of  conduct  and  of  organization, 
but  never  by  any  chance  a  degree  of  progress  which 
does  not  point  beyond  to  something  else  still  unat- 
tained.  Life  seems  to  be  simply  a  preface  to  more  life, 
a  perpetual  preparing  for  something  that  we  get  no 
nearer  to,  a  march  in  a  dream,  in  which  we  exhaust 
ourselves  with  marching  and  come  out  where  we 
started.  And  the  only  happy  man  is  he  who  learns  to 
love  marching  itself,  with  all  its  fatigue  and  its  uncer- 
tainty of  a  destination.  The  old  tragic  and  comic 
forms  reflect  the  belief  in  some  kind  of  destination, — 
except  indeed  when  they  are  mere  profitless  fable, 
— but  the  new  realism  must  continue,  seemingly,  to 
record  the  march. 

The  question  is,  then,  whether  love  of  life  and  of 
those  who  live  it  is  in  itself  enough  for  a  faith.  For 
after  all  this  is  the  choice:  between  the  temper  that 
loves  life  and  finds  it  sufficient,  and  the  temper  that 
loves  life  but  finds  it  insufficient  until  it  is  explained 
and  exalted  by  faith  in  something  outside  it.  I  say 
nothing  about  the  realist  who  does  not  love  life  at  all, 
who  writes  about  it  in  distrust  or  contempt  or  stupor. 
Realism  has  found  room  for  him  too,  with  his  several 
kinds  of  morbidity  and  fleshliness  and  insistence  on 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY        203 

the  primal  brute  in  man.  If  he  were  a  factor  in  the 
choice,  we  should  have  less,  not  more,  to  hope  for. 
But  the  man  who  does  honestly  love  human  nature 
as  it  is,  and  does  find  the  sight  of  humanity  good, 
so  that  he  really  does  not  want  any  leverage  to  be 
exerted  on  the  world  from  without ;  to  put  the  matter 
quite  bluntly,  the  man  who  does  not  want  a  God, 
and  would  regard  the  existence  of  one  as  an  unwar- 
rantable and  meaningless  intrusion  into  a  scheme 
which  means  enough  just  by  virtue  of  its  own  exist- 
ence— has  that  man,  in  democracy,  solidarity,  and 
the  sense  of  kinship  with  his  fellows,  enough  to  hold 
to,  and  to  build  a  great  art  upon  ? 

It  is  a  very  important  question,  because  that  man  is 
the  artist  of  the  present  and,  in  all  likelihood,  of  the 
future.  Meanwhile,  it  is  useful  for  us  to  see  that  his 
philosophy  of  life  does  not  cut  him  off  from  criticism 
of  life.  He  is  still  free  to  choose  what  he  likes,  what 
he  wants,  and  to  express  his  choice  in  a  shape  which 
shall  have  consistency  and  symmetry.  If  he  distrust 
life,  he  can  only  express  himself  in  comedies  which 
turn  into  farce,  and  in  tragedies  which  show  the 
ascendancy  of  the  brute  over  the  man.  But  if  he  trust 
life,  he  is  free  to  single  out  the  elements  which  in- 
spire his  confidence,  and  to  make  of  them  his  message ; 
he  is  free,  as  Miss  Margaret  Sherwood  says  in  a  finely 
idealistic  essay,1  for  the  "enduring  realism"  of 
"helping  to  make  greater  things  real." 

After  all,  it  is  only  in  one  generation,  the  present, 

i  The  Timidity   of  Our  Boldness,  Atlantic  Monthly,   Janu- 
ary, 1917,  pp.  64-70. 


204  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

that  realism  has  become  apathetic;  and  three  of  the 
greatest  men  of  the  literary  generation  before  it,  all 
of  them  essentially  moderns  and  realists,  preached  a 
fine  idealism.  Meredith  had  a  vision  of  something 
amounting  to  human  perfectibility  through  purely 
human  agencies;  Henry  James  proved  that  human  na- 
ture is  even  now,  in  those  of  its  aspects  which  he  loved, 
rarer  and  finer  than  it  commonly  knows  itself  to  be; 
and  William  Dean  Howells,  a  generation  ahead  of 
even  these  two  in  discovering  the  religion  of  place, 
was  preaching  the  most  homespun  realities  and  the 
"wise  provincialism"  of  Royce  at  a  time  when  patriot- 
ism was  shame-faced  and  the  intellectual  ideal  of  the 
Western  world  was  a  shallow  aesthetic  cosmopolitan- 
ism. I  can  explain  this  paradox,  the  sluggishness  of 
faith  in  life  in  our  second  generation  of  realists,  only 
by  the  enervating  weariness  which  comes  upon  any 
movement  after  it  has  outlived  the  inspiration  of 
newness.  The  older  realists  welcomed  as  a  challenge 
the  dawn  of  a  world  in  which  man  must  do  all  for 
himself.  They  took  up  the  defiance  with  the  spirit 
of  youth,  always  sanguine  of  its  own  powers  and  keen 
for  the  fight.  Realism  is  older  now,  and  begins  to 
wonder,  to  think  twice.  But  one  generation  is  too 
short  a  time  to  be  discouraged  about. 

Meanwhile,  we  speculate  about  the  new  tragi-comedy 
of  the  real  which  must  save  imaginative  fiction  from 
purposeless  realism,  just  as  realism  saved  it  from 
tragedy  and  comedy  in  which  the  purpose  was  too 
shallow  and  too  false;  and  we  find  a  clue  to  that 
renewing    spirit   of    fiction,   the   spirit   of   idealistic 


TRAGEDY    AND     COMEDY       205 


realism,  in  such  words  as  these  of  Mr.  Howells,  writ- 
ten long  ago  in  answer  to  Matthew  Arnold's  comment 
that  there  was  no  "distinction"  in  our  national 
life  :— 

"...  I  would  gladly  persuade  all  artists  intending 
greatness  in  any  kind  among  us  that  the  recognition 
of  the  fact  pointed  out  by  Mr.  Arnold  ought  to  be  a 
source  of  inspiration  to  them,  and  not  discouragement. 
We  have  been  now  some  hundred  years  building  up  a 
state  on  the  affirmation  of  the  essential  equality  of 
men  in  their  rights  and  duties,  and  whether  we  have 
been  right  or  been  wrong  the  gods  have  taken  us  at 
our  word,  and  have  responded  to  us  with  a  civiliza- 
tion in  which  there  is  no  'distinction'  perceptible  to 
the  eye  that  loves  and  values  it.  Such  beauty  and 
such  grandeur  as  we  have  is  common  beauty,  common 
grandeur,  or  the  beauty  and  grandeur  in  which  the 
quality  of  solidarity  so  prevails  that  neither  distin- 
guishes itself  to  the  disadvantage  of  anything  else. 
It  seems  to  me  that  these  conditions  invite  the  artist 
to  the  study  and  the  appreciation  of  the  common,  and 
to  the  portrayal  in  every  art  of  those  finer  and  higher 
aspects  which  unite  rather  than  sever  humanity,  if  he 
would  thrive  in  our  new  order  of  things.  The  talent 
that  is  robust  enough  to  front  the  every-day  world 
and  catch  the  charm  of  its  work-worn,  care-worn, 
brave,  kindly  face,  need  not  fear  the  encounter,  though 
it  seems  terrible  to  the  sort  nurtured  in  the  supersti- 
tion of  the  romantic,  the  bizarre,  the  heroic,  the  dis- 
tinguished, as  the  things  alone  worthy  of  painting  or 
carving  or  writing.     The   arts  must   become   demo- 


206  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

cratic,  and  then  we  shall  have  the  expression  of  Amer- 
ica in  art;  and  the  reproach  which  Mr.  Arnold  was 
half  right  in  making  us  shall  have  no  justice  in  it  any 
longer ;  we  shall  be  '  distinguished. '  "  x 

i  Criticism   and   Fiction,   pp.    138-40.     New    York:    Harper 
and  Bros.     MDCCCXCI1I. 


VIII 


HUMANISM 


In  discussing  the  elements  of  tragedy  and  comedy 
in  fiction,  I  hope  I  succeeded  in  showing  that  those 
elements,  if  they  now  existed  in  anything  like  the 
former  measure,  would  derive  an  entirely  changed  sig- 
nificance from  our  changed  conception  of  the  whole 
world,  and  would  in  fact  have  lost  a  great  part  of 
their  legitimate  appeal  to  our  emotions  through  our 
intellect.  I  implied  a  connection  between  those  ele- 
ments as  they  once  existed,  and  the  artist's  general 
philosophy.  His  comedy  denoted  a  belief,  conscious 
or  unconscious,  that  everything  was  fundamentally 
right  and  would  come  out  right;  his  tragedy,  which 
showed  evil  as  for  the  moment  regnant  over  good, 
drew  its  compensation  from  the  fact  that  the  triumph 
of  evil  was  only  for  the  moment,  an  exceptional 
thing.  Thus  comedy  and  tragedy  were  both  expres- 
sions, one  positive,  the  other  negative,  of  an  absolute 
and  unquestioning  faith  in  the  goodness  of  life. 
Comedy  expressed  that  faith  directly;  tragedy 
showed  how  many  and  how  severe  were  the  temporary 
checks  it  could  persist  in  spite  of. 

But  with  the  disappearance  of  that  older  philosophy 
and  the  rise  of  a  new  philosophy  in  which  the  appear- 
ances are  the  reality  and  the  sum  of  the  appearances 
is  the  sum  of  the  realty,  absolute  tragedy  and  comedy 
become  virtually   impossible.     Either,   being  an   ex- 

209 


210  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

treme,  would  connote  a  view  of  the  world  which  no  one 
can  hold,  so  long  as  he  derives  his  view  from  the  world 
itself.  And  either  becomes,  therefore,  an  inartistic 
misrepresentation  of  life,  a  travesty  and  something 
like  a  lie.  In  brief,  tragedy  and  comedy  were, 
in  one  way  or  another,  outgrowths  of  general  ideas 
about  fate  and  life ;  and  it  is  the  change  in  general 
ideas  that  has  forced  tragedy  and  comedy  out  of  all 
fiction  which  subordinates  every  ideal  to  the  quest 
and  the  study  of  truth. 

There  can  be  not  much  doubt,  I  suppose,  about  the 
second  half  of  this  account.  The  change  in  our  gen- 
eral attitude  has  beyond  question  the  effect  of  forcing 
out  of  fiction  the  old  assumptions  and  definite  conclu- 
sions and  of  replacing  them  by  questions  and  hesita- 
tions, research  among  things  knowable  and  demonstra- 
ble. Modern  thinking  can  hardly  coexist  in  art  with 
the  unrelieved  tragic  or  comic  outcome. 

But  am  I  right  in  the  first  half  of  my  account?  Is 
it  true  that  the  general  ideas  in  fiction  have  changed, 
or  is  it  simply  that  they  have  just  begun  to  make 
their  way  into  fiction?  Is  not  the  chief  mark  of  the 
older  novel  its  entire  freedom  from  philosophy  of 
whatever  sort,  and  is  not  the  chief  distinction  of  the 
older  novelists  their  absolute  divorce  from  every  re- 
sponsibility except  the  study  and  mastery  of  human 
nature  seen  through  imagination  ?  Is  not  the  present 
concern  of  the  novel  with  large  general  truths  a  new 
thing,  and  may  it  not  mean  simply  the  decadence  of 
the  novel  because  of  the  lack  of  great  individual  artists 
with  their  inspired  knowledge  of  the  specific?    May 


PI  U  MAN  ISM  211 

not  the  philosophy  in  our  fiction  be  our  feeble  attempt 
to  replace  the  particular,  which  means  too  little  to  us, 
with  the  general,  which  has  not.  so  secure  a  place  in 
art?  Ought  not  the  particular,  rather  than  the  gen- 
eral, to  be  the  prime  concern  of  the  artist,  his  inspira- 
tion and  his  home  ?  Or,  to  narrow  the  question  down 
to  a  pocketable  and  arguable  form:  Historically 
speaking,  does  philosophy  belong  in  the  novel  at  all? 
Is  it  either  necessary  or  desirable  ? 

The  modern  artist  answers,  of  course,  that  the 
worker  in  fiction  must  have  at  his  command  both  the 
general  and  the  particular,  that  his  task  is  to  repre- 
sent the  general  through  the  particular,  to  master  both 
the  facts  and  their  meanings.  In  the  technical  jar- 
gon, art  is  both  presentative  and  representative.  But 
this  is  only  his  answer,  a  certain  kind  of  opinion ;  and 
it  leaves  the  question  where  it  was,  to  be  squarely 
faced  as  an  issue  on  which  hangs  our  acceptance  or 
rejection  of  a  good  deal  that  has  happened  since  1860, 
the  date  when,  roughly  speaking,  the  modern  novel 
began  to  pay  tribute  to  modern  rationalism  and  ac- 
quire thereby  an  intellect  and  a  social  conscience. 

Need  I  emphasize  the  momentousness  of  the  ques- 
tion? Its  vast  import  becomes  at  once  self-evident 
if  we  ask  it  about  Shakspere,  by  whom  the  Western 
part  of  the  world  has  pretty  well  agreed  to  let  a  good 
share  of  its  theories  of  creative  art  stand  or  fall. 
Shakspere  was  not,  to  be  sure,  a  novelist,  even  of  the 
Elizabethan  school ;  but  our  question  is  large  enough 
to  bear  on  the  drama  equally,  and  any  one's  imagina- 
tion can  bridge  the  gap  between  the  sort  of  plays 


212  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

Shakspere  wrote  and  the  sort  of  novels  he  would  have 
written  if  he  had  lived  in  the  age  of  Fielding.  I 
choose  Shakspere,  first  because  no  other  one  figure  is 
grand  enough  to  provide  so  crucial  a  test  of  any- 
sweeping  generalization  about  art,  and  secondly  be- 
cause in  him  it  is  harder  than  in  any  other  to  trace 
the  existence  and  the  importance  of  any  general  theo- 
ries whatsoever,  so  that  if  we  find  them  in  him  we 
shall  hardly  be  able  to  overlook  their  importance  else- 
where. 

Let  us  not  be  put  off  with  assumptions,  such  as  that 
any  artist,  whether  he  wishes  to  or  not,  whether  he  is 
prophet  and  seer  or  mere  entertainer,  must,  as  a 
first  condition  of  greatness,  reflect  the  principal  opin- 
ions of  his  age.  Let  us  assume  nothing  whatever 
about  Shakspere.  Let  us  recognize  two  facts:  first, 
that  if  Shakspere  can  be  shown  to  have  gained  as 
a  dramatist  through  believing  something  about  the 
soul  and  its  immortality  and  about  the  ethical  organi- 
zation of  man's  life  by  a  will  outside  man,  then  the 
presence  of  philosophy  in  imaginative  literature  has 
the  highest  thinkable  historical  sanction  and  a  greatly 
lengthened  ancestry  in  modern  times ;  secondly,  that, 
if  Shakspere  can  be  shown  pagan,  conscience-free,  and 
careless  of  all  except  the  reality  in  the  life  and  char- 
acter which  he  portrayed,  then  we  are  entitled  to  say 
that  an  artist's  theories  of  the  world,  so  far  from  being 
important,  may  be  only  disguises  for  his  insufficiency 
as  an  artist.  If  Shakspere  means  more  when  we  con- 
sider him  at  bottom  a  philosopher,  then  philosophy  is 
certainly  at  home  in  art.     If,  on  the  other  hand,  he 


HUMANISM  213 


means  more  when  regarded,  in  Emerson's  phrase,  as 
"only  master  of  the  revels,"  then  philosophy  in  art 
may  be  only  an  interloper,  a  skeleton  in  the  closet 
or  a  spectre  at  the  feast.  In  which  way  are  we  to 
accept  Shakspere,  and  how  can  we  make  up  our 
minds  ? 


II 


Not,  I  think,  by  trying  to  go  where  so  many  genera- 
tions of  scholars  have  failed  to  find  quite  what  they 
sought — that  is,  into  the  intricacies  of  textual  criti- 
cism. Not  by  trying  to  prove  out  of  Shakspere 's  own 
written  words  that  he  believed  any  particular  doc- 
trine that  could  be  construed  as  a  cosmic  philosophy. 
We  do  not  need,  in  this  connection  and  for  this  pur- 
pose, to  convict  him  of  having  been  orthodox  or  hereti- 
cal, Christian  or  pagan,  ascetic  or  voluptuary,  philos- 
opher or  fool.  Let  us  fix  in  our  minds  the  question 
and  its  purpose.  The  question  is  not  what  Shak- 
spere believed,  or  even,  exactly,  whether  he  be- 
lieved anything  in  particular;  it  is  whether  the 
plays  as  we  have  them  mean  more,  or  less,  if  we 
suppose  their  author  to  have  had  some  definite 
theory  of  human  life  in  its  relation  to  eternity  and 
to  fate.  And  the  purpose  of  the  question  is  that 
we  may  find  out,  in  this  one  crucial  instance,  whether 
philosophy  has  or  has  not  a  place  in  imaginative  art. 
The  only  method  necessary  to  such  an  inquiry  is  the 
broadly  pragmatic  one  of  weighing  what  Shakspere 
means  to  us,  as  we  speculate  upon  his  whole  purpose 


214  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

and  significance ;  and  in  order  that  we  may  escape  so 
far  as  possible  the  bias  of  our  own  time,  and  avoid 
making  Shakspere  mean  simply  what  we  wish  him  to 
mean,  we  ought  to  look  at  him  through  the  eyes  of  the 
generations  of  criticism,  trying  if  we  can.  find  the 
key  that  unlocks  the  most  secrets — not  accepting  this 
or  that  critic's  view,  however  stoutly  defended,  but 
setting  off  one  thing  against  another  and  seeing  what 
it  all  comes  to  when  applied  to  the  essential  Shakspere, 
the  Shakspere  of  the  sonnets,  the  narrative  poems,  and 
the  plays. 

Now,  as  soon  as  we  are  ready  to  give  up  trying  to 
prove  that  Shakspere  believed  or  did  not  believe  this 
or  that;  as  soon  as  we  make  it  our  affair  to  get  the 
richest  available  composite  view  of  him  and  base  our 
judgment  on  it  instead  of  on  any  individual  interpre- 
tation; as  soon  as  we  cease  to  care  very  much  what 
unexpressed  faith  he  held,  and  begin  to  care  exceed- 
ingly what  faith  does  most  for  the  meaning  of  his 
work — what  faith,  artistically  speaking,  he  ought  to 
have  held — then  we  shall  be  on  the  verge  of  a  strik- 
ing revelation.  This  method,  pursued  in  this  attitude, 
will  tell  us  what  we  ask,  and  more.  It  will  answer 
the  question  about  philosophy, — that  is,  whether  it  has 
eternal  fitness  in  art, — and  it  will  answer  with  all  but 
the  most  absolute  certainty  the  question  I  have  care- 
fully refrained  thus  far  from  asking, — that  is,  What 
was  Shakspere 's  philosophy? 

The  answer  contains  everything  that  the  textual 
critics,  being  not  pragmatists  but  scientists,  have 
sought  and  must  seek  in  vain,  the  dramatist's  im- 


HUMANISM  215 

personal  aloofness  from  his  material  defeating  and 
eluding  them  at  every  turn.  It  is  an  answer  that 
not  only  makes  the  plays  cry  out  to  us  to  be  read 
in  a  certain  way  and  seen  through  the  window 
of  certain  fundamental  beliefs,  but  actually  tells 
us  with  almost  unerring  precision  what  those  beliefs 
must  be.  At  least  we  can  reach,  through  the  answer, 
this  point :  we  can  say  with  complete  assurance  either 
that  Shakspere  believed  steadfastly  those  doctrines  in 
the  light  of  which  the  plays  crave  to  be  interpreted, 
or  else  that  he  was  the  lightest,  most  irresponsible  of 
mortals,  with  not  a  shred  of  consistency  to  identify 
Shakspere  the  artist  with  Shakspere  the  man.  It  is 
easier  for  me  to  believe  that  those  two  are  one  than  it 
is  to  believe  that  Shakspere  was  only  a  facile  pres- 
tidigitator, admitting  no  connection  between  the  words 
he  wrote  and  the  man  he  was,  and  achieving  by  some 
queer  accident  forty  complete  works  which  merely  hap- 
pened to  focus  themselves  on  an  interpretation  of  life 
that  he  had  never  thought  of  and  on  a  belief  that  he 
had  never  held.  This  alternative  seems  precluded  by 
the  very  nature  of  the  relation  between  the  creator 
and  the  creation,  in  art  and  everywhere  else;  and 
therefore  I  say,  The  doctrines  which  make  the  plays 
mean  most  to  us  and,  so  far  as  we  can  judge,  to  all 
time,  are  the  doctrines  which  Shakspere  believed.  If, 
however,  any  one  likes  to  believe  that  the  doctrines 
which  do  most  for  the  plays  are  the  doctrines  which 
Shakspere  did  not  believe,  he  is  welcome  to  that  self- 
indulgence.  For  all  I  need  to  insist  on  at  this  mo- 
ment is  the  extreme  fitness  and  justice  of  our  letting 


216  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

the  plays  read  themselves  in  the  light  of  certain  truths 
which  greatly  intensify  their  meaning,  even  if  we 
doubt  whether  Shakspere  saw  those  truths. 

The  central  revelation  of  the  plays  to  us  is  this :  that 
they  are  the  work  of  a  man  who  understood — whether 
with  his  intellect  or  only  with  his  intuition  makes  no 
difference — that  eternity,  fate,  God,  the  immortality 
of  the  soul,  eventual  punishment  and  reward  are  in 
one  sense  simply  not  man's  affair  at  all;  that  they  are 
fundamentally  unintelligible  to  his  finite  mind,  the 
most  irrelevant,  even  if  the  most  enthralling,  of  his 
concerns.  These  things  are  in  the  lap  of  the  gods; 
and  man's  affair,  to  state  it  in  some  very  modern- 
sounding  words,  is  to  "will  what  the  gods  will  with- 
out, perhaps,  being  certain  what  their  will  is — or  even 
if  they  have  a  will  of  their  own."  x  We  do  not  in  the 
least  know  whether  Shakspere  believed  in  the  exist- 
ence of  God ;  but  we  do  know  that,  if  he  so  believed,  the 
meaning  of  God  was  in  man's  need  of  him.  We  do 
not  know  whether  he  believed  in  the  immortality  of 
the  self-conscious  soul ;  but  we  do  know  that,  if  he 
so  believed,  it  was  the  will  to  immortality  that  inter- 
ested him,  and  not  the  immortality  itself  as  a  hypothe- 
sis. In  every  way  he  accepts,  faithfully  and  joyously, 
the  finite  conditions  of  man's  life  here  and  now,  the  im- 
passable bounds  beyond  which  reason  and  knowledge 
cannot  penetrate.  We  cannot  imagine  him  as  being 
indifferent  to  anything  that  was  human;  but  neither 
can  we  imagine  him  as  being  interested  in  anything 

1  A  Personal  Record.  By  Joseph  Conrad.  Harper  &  Bros. 
MCMXU.     P.  13. 


HUMANISM  217 

except  because  it  was  human.  And  when  he  listens 
to  man's  "Fables  of  the  Above,"  it  makes  little  differ- 
ence whether  he  takes  them  as  fables  or  as  truths: 
either  way,  what  touches  him  most  nearly  is  that 
they  are  man's,  wrought  out  of  man's  own  desire  or 
need. 

It  may  indeed  be  so;  this  may  indeed  be  the  lost 
or  mislaid  truth  of  our  Shakspere.  I  spoke  of  his 
critics,  the  history  of  appreciation  of  him.  What  I 
had  in  mind  was  this :  Every  attempt  to  identify  the 
message  and  the  meaning  of  Shakspere  with  the  tenets 
of  any  individual  or  of  any  age  has  resulted  simply  in 
the  belittling  of  Shakspere.1  Assume  him  Anglican, 
and  you  have  cut  off  a  part  of  him  that  we  should 
all  like  to  keep;  assume  him  Catholic,  and  you  have 
made  him  only  part  of  what  he  seems  to  us.  He  is 
not  atheist,  he  is  not  theist;  that  is,  he  is  not  primarily 
either  one  or  the  other.  In  his  pragmatism,  the  ques- 
tion of  whether  God  made  man  or  man  made  God 
makes  no  conceivable  difference  to  anything  that  can 
be  known  or  experienced;  and  every  critic  who  has 
attempted  to  define  Shakspere  by  a  definite  formula 
of  faith  or  of  doubt  has  subjected  Shakspere  to  a  limi- 
tation to  which  nothing  in  Shakspere  gives  any  suffi- 
cient sanction. 

Now,  when  you  scan  one  after  another  these 
special  and  restricting  interpretations  of  the  master 
and    pick    out    the   weakness    in    each;    and    when, 

i  For  an  accessible  summary  of  such  attempts,  see  Shake- 
speare Criticism  (Heminge  and  Condell  to  Carlyle).  Intro- 
duction by  D.  Nichol  Smith.     Oxford  University  Press.     1916. 


218  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

having  done  that,  you  search  for  the  formula  which 
escapes  all  the  weaknesses  and  leaves  Shakspere  mean- 
ing the  utmost  that  he  can  mean  when  left  free  to  in- 
terpret himself,  you  find  that  the  only  theory  which 
robs  him  of  no  glory,  the  only  one  which  leaves  him 
in  full  possession  of  all  that  we  actually  find  in  him,  is 
this  theory  of  his  humanism.  The  Shakspere  we  know 
through  the  plays  and  poems  was  a  man  who  could 
have  made  the  epigram,  "If  God  had  not  existed,  it 
would  have  been  necessary  to  invent  him";  for  Shak- 
spere had  the  supreme  revelation  that,  whether  God 
did  exist  or  whether  man  did  invent  him,  the  effect  on 
man's  conscious  life  in  the  knowable  world  is  pre- 
cisely one  and  the  same.  This  is  the  revelation  that 
makes  our  Shakspere,  not  Anglican,  not  Catholic,  not 
demonstrably  pagan  or  Christian,  Epicurean  or  Stoic, 
but  pragmatist  by  temper,  and  by  intuition  humanist. 


Ill 


When,  in  talk  with  a  sharp-witted  young  student 
of  literature,  I  ventured  to  broach  this  theory  that, 
for  Shakspere,  man's  conscious  life  was  the  focal 
point  of  all  reality,  that  everything  in  the  universe, 
real  or  fancied,  was  valuable  to  Shakspere  only  in 
so  far  as  it  touched  man,  and  that  all  attempts  to 
confine  the  meaning  of  Shakspere  by  any  other  form- 
ula resulted  in  a  belittlement  of  him  to  the  critic's 
own  preconception,  I  was  met,  expecting  indeed  noth- 
ing less,  by  this  rejoinder:  "But  how  do  you  know 
that  this  humanistic  interpretation  of  Shakspere  is  not 


HUMANISM  219 

also  a  belittlement  of  him?  Why  isn't  it  just  as 
narrow  for  the  20th  century  to  find  him  humanist 
as  it  was  for  the  18th  to  find  him  Anglican  or  atheist  ? 
Aren't  you  simply  proposing  that  every  age  shall 
find  Shakspere  to  be  whatever  it  happens  to  prefer? 
And  can  you  ever  have  a  unified  Shakspere  short  of 
a  unifying  philosophy  that  shall  reconcile  all  the  dis- 
crepancies and  all  the  prejudices?" 

It  is  of  course  true  that  we  have  no  more  right  to 
interpret  Shakspere  in  our  way  than  Dr.  Johnson  had 
to  interpret  him  in  his.  But  there  are  some  points  to 
be  urged  in  favour  of  our  interpretation  against  the 
sum  of  all  the  others. 

First,  it  seems  to  me  important  that  our  interpreta- 
tion leaves  room  for  what  is  essential  in  the  others. 
There  is  nothing  whatever  in  Shakspere  to  prohibit  my 
identifying  him  with  any  religion  I  happen  person- 
ally to  believe  in,  provided  I  see  that,  whatever  the 
religion  be,  his  emphasis  is  upon  its  meaning  to  some- 
body, to  man.  Shakspere  may  have  believed  that 
death  is  the  end  of  consciousness,  or  he  may  have  be- 
lieved that  it  is  the  transition  to  eternal  life ;  but  in 
either  case  it  is  the  end  of  the  temporal  life,  which 
has,  in  either  case,  to  be  lived  in  the  same  way.  He 
may  have  believed  that  God  was  one  or  that  God  was 
three,  that  God  is  love  or  that  God  is  vengeance ;  but 
none  of  these  differences  has  anything  whatever  to 
do  with  his  conception  of  godliness.  Humanism,  the 
creed  in  which  all  the  religions  and  all  the  philosophies 
meet  at  a  common  point,  the  sum  of  the  elements 
common  to  them  all,  is  at  once  reconcilable  with  each 


220  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

and  greater  than  any.  It  is  the  one  philosophy  which 
uses  every  other  to  the  glorification  of  life — of  life, 
which  alone  means  anything  to  art.  A  sceptical  age 
will  understand  Shakspere  as  portraying  the  courage 
of  man  living  on  his  mote  of  dust  in  empty  space, 
serenely  unafraid  of  the  dark  out  into  which  he  must 
presently  go,  and  heartening  himself  with  his  fables 
of  light  beyond  the  darkness.  A  believing  age  will 
understand  him  as  portraying  the  courage  of  man  liv- 
ing by  the  evidence  of  things  not  seen,  the  substance 
of  things  hoped  for.  But  what  they  must  both  under- 
stand, if  they  are  to  have  what  Shakspere  gives,  is  his 
mastery  of  the  one  thing — the  courage  of  man.  Man 
is  the  genesis  of  all  things  accessible  to  art;  and  the 
task  of  Shakspere  is  to  tell  all  the  truth,  not  about  the 
religions  and  philosophies  as  facts,  but  about  their 
meaning  to  man  and  their  effect  upon  him — the  effect, 
I  mean,  which  they  have  upon  him  whether  they  be 
true  or  false,  historical  or  apocryphal.  This  is  the 
only  reading  of  Shakspere  which  exalts  him  as  in- 
terpreter of  what  is  quintessential  in  our  tangled  life 
— as  which,  nearly  all  criticism  admits  him  to  be 
supreme. 

Secondly,  a  historical  consideration.  The  Renais- 
sance came  late  to  England,  but  with  intensity.  And 
when  it  came  it  put  England  almost  at  once  in 
possession,  not  only  of  the  classical  learning,  but  of 
all  the  modern  humanistic  embroidery  upon  it  of  a 
century  of  continental  Renaissance.  Everybody  who 
has  studied  even  superficially  the  Cinquecento  in  Italy 
knows  how  merely  nominal  was  the  subservience  of 


HUMANISM  221 

philosophy  to  religion,  and  how  orthodoxy  was  subtly 
corroded  by  speculative  doctrines  preached  from 
within  the  very  Church,  and  calculated  to  deceive  the 
very  elect.  The  Church  was  largely  given  over  to 
materialism ;  and,  so  long  as  its  temporal  power  was 
not  endangered,  it  was  not  above  housing  and  feeding 
the  philosophers  who  gave  it  intellectual  prestige  even 
while  they  undermined  its  doctrinal  foundations.  The 
Church  was  cannily  making  to  itself  friends  of  the 
Mammon  of  unrighteousness;  and  it  was  an  age  when 
one  could  hear  atheism  and  the  mortality  of  the  soul 
preached  in  high  places,  in  discourse  which  paid  to  the 
Church  no  other  tribute  than  the  use  of  its  ritual  and 
its  vocabulary.  It  was  an  age  of  humanism  and 
free-thinking;  and  one  of  its  chief  symptoms  is 
the  delight  of  intellectual  men  in  metaphysical  specula- 
tion for  its  own  sake — that  is,  for  the  training  of  the 
mind  in  subtlety  and  agility  and  poise,  and  for  the 
sense  that  the  human  intellect  could  get  beyond  and 
outside  everything.  In  short,  it  was  an  age  when 
philosophy  and  scholasticism  were  nothing  if  not 
humanistic ;  and  from  a  thousand  references  in  the 
plays  and  sonnets,  and  from  the  general  delight  of 
Shakspere  in  metaphysical  hair-splitting,  sometimes 
purely  verbal,  one  can  trace  his  profound  kinship  with 
these  developments,  his  triumphant  joy  in  the  intel- 
lect as  an  instrument  giving  man  sway  over  space 
and  time. 

I  urge  this  point  against  the  suggestion  that  the 
humanistic  interpretation  is  only  our  20th  century 
way  of  circumscribing  Shakspere,  of  outfitting  him 


222  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

with  our  parochial  philosophy.  As  a  fact,  our 
philosophy  comes  much  nearer  to  naturalism.  But 
then  humanism  was  in  the  air;  he  would  have 
been  more  than  man,  or  less  than  artist,  if  he  had 
wholly  escaped  it.  His  humanism  can  be  accounted 
for  historically  without  going  farther  back  than  his 
own  16th  century.  With  time,  we  could  extend 
the  ancestry  of  humanism  to  classical  Greece  and 
Rome — to  the  great  harbours  of  ancient  cultivation  in 
which  all  that  is  most  precious  in  the  Middle  Ages  has 
its  origins,  and  in  which,  as  Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch 
points  out  in  his  book  On  the  Art  of  Writing,1  the 
moral  and  spiritual  life  of  our  own  time  has  its  im- 
movable anchorage. 

IV 

Both  philosophically  and  historically,  then,  the 
humanistic  reading  of  Shakspere  has  justification,  a 
most  persuasive  reasonableness.  And  when,  finally, 
we  come  to  the  supreme  works  themselves,  we  find  al- 
most everything  to  corroborate,  almost  nothing  to 
deny.  I  pass  over  all  but  a  hint  or  two  of  the  strong 
tendency  which  Shakspere  everywhere  shows  to  let  his 
vivid  realization  of  man 's  temporal  life  take  the  form 
of  a  complete  and  untroubled  agnosticism  about 
everything  else.  There  is  plenty  of  evidence  that  he 
conceived  death  as  a  sweet  oblivion,  a  surcease  from 
that  of  which  life  is  full  enough  ;  and  the  sweet  finality 
of  that  repose,  the  profound  immobility  of  that  sleep 

i  New  York :     G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 


HUMANISM  223 


immune  from  even  the  fear  of  dreams  which  should 
prove  life  not  utterly  extinguished,  are  lyrical  notes 
sounded  always  with  a  tenderness  which  must  have 
had  something  to  do  with  Shakspere's  own  desire. 
Death  is  to  him  "death's  dateless  night";  and  again 
and  again  he  expresses  the  purely  humanistic  concep- 
tion of  immortality  in  contexts  where,  if  he  had  be- 
lieved in  any  other  conception,  he  must  have  given 
some  hint.  All,  his  sonnets  of  the  love  of  men  and 
women  are  haunted  by  this  note,  of  beauty  in  the  very 
finiteness  of  the  experience ;  and  in  the  sonnets  of  re- 
membered love,  there  is  nowhere  expressed  the  hope  of 
reunion  after  death,  or  of  any  renewal  except  that  of 
memory  re-creating  out  of  its  need  the  desired  shape, 
the  lost  presence. 

And  all  of  the  phrases  which,  isolated,  bear  some 
seeming  hint  of  orthodox  faith,  seem  in  their  contexts 
to  crave  another  interpretation.  The  exquisite  an- 
tiphonal  dirge  in  Cymbeline  speaks  of  a  task  done,  a 
home  reached,  wages  ta'en;  but  that  home,  it  at  once 
appears,  is  the  grave's  "cpiiet  consummation,"  and 
the  wages  are  oblivion  for  the  consciousness  and  re- 
nown in  the  memories  of  others.  ' '  Thou  hast  finished 
joy  and  moan,"  "To  thee  the  reed  is  as  the  oak." 


"No  exorciser  harm  thee! 
Nor.no  witchcraft  charm  thee! 
Ghost  unlaid  forbear  thee ! 
Nothing  ill  come  near  thee!" 


*6 


—  such  negative  immortality  is  the  reward,  and  the 
only  suggestion  of  a  positive  immortality  is  that  thor- 


224  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


oughly  humanistic  faith  that  the  living  can  confer 
perpetual  life  upon  the  dead  by  not  forgetting  their 
lives. 

Even  the  famous  and  controverted  Sonnet  CXLVI, 
with  its  cry  of  triumph  over  death, 

"And  Death  once  dead,  there's  no  more  dying  then," 

seems  on  analysis  to  be  a  plea  for  intensifying  the  in- 
ward life  of  the  soul  by  something  very  like  a  re- 
ligious ascetic's  mortification  of  the  body.  This  son- 
net is  one  of  many  records  of  the  duality  of  Shak- 
spere,  of  the  perpetual  conflict  in  his  life  and  mind 
between  a  starry  poet,  dreamer,  and  idealist,  and  an 
earth-bound  respectable  citizen  who  took  thought  for 
the  morrow,  both  tenants  of  the  same  clay. 

"Why  so  large  cost,  having  so  short  a  lease, 
Dost  thou  upon  thy  fading  mansion  spend?" 

Rather,  let  the  soul  live  on  the  loss  of  its  servant,  the 
body;  let  the  soul,  renewed  in  its  own  ardent  extra- 
physical  life,  glory  in  the  body's  failure  and  decay;  do 
not  devote  the  powers  that  are  at  best  short-lived  to 
making  costly  provision  for  the  worms  which  are  "  in- 
heritors of  this  excess."  Instead,  "feed  on  Death, 
that  feeds  on  men";  that  is, 

"Within  be  fed,  without  be  rich  no  more." 

The  sonnet  comes  down,  then,  to  a  simple  assertion 
that  when  we  live  most  imaginatively  and  least  mate- 
rially we  rob  death  by  leaving  so  much  less  for  pal- 
pable dissolution,  and  so  much  more  for  the  cherishing 
memories  of  other  men  to  seize  on;  we  kill  death  by 


HUMANISM  225 

starvation.  And  this  idealistic  humanism  seems  to  be 
everywhere  Shakspere's  principal  thought  about 
eternity. 

When  we  come  to  the  ghosts,  we  find  in  them  only 
confirmation  of  this  same  idealistic  humanism.  Now, 
it  is  true  enough  that  Shakspere  may  have  accepted 
unthinkingly — or,  for  that  matter,  thinkingly — the 
superstition  of  his  time.  He  may  easily  have  be- 
lieved in  the  reality,  even  in  the  corporeality,  of 
spirits  of  the  dead.  But  it  is  to  be  noted,  first  of  all, 
that  that  was  essentially  a  pagan,  not  a  Christian, 
superstition;  a  belief,  not  in  immortal  spirits,  but 
simply  in  the  unlaid  ghost.  Oblivion  was  coming; 
but  there  was  some  debt  left  unpaid  in  the  flesh,  some 
wrong  unrighted,  which  stood  between  the  tortured 
spirit  and  the  longed-for  "quiet  consummation"  of  the 
grave.  The  failure  to  have  achieved  oblivion  was 
always  in  itself  a  tragedy;  ^and  the  ghost's  one  con- 
cern was  to  shake  off  those  evil  dreams  of  reality 
which  had  persisted  even  beyond  the  body's  corrup- 
tion, in  order  that  it  might  lie  down  to  an  eternity 
of  rest. 

Whether  or  not  Shakspere  did  accept  this  supersti- 
tion is  a  matter  of  little  consequence.  His  plays 
neither  gain  nor  lose  anything  of  great  importance, 
whether  the  ghosts  in  them  are  staged  as  visible  appa- 
ritions or  as  ideal  and  symbolical  perceptions  in  the 
minds  of  the  actors.  For,  whatever  Shakspere's  own 
attitude  toward  the  pagan  concept  of  the  unlaid  ghost, 
he  found  the  only  way  to  cheat  it  of  its  grossness. 
The    ghost   always    exists,    not    to    show    something 


226  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


about  a  life  other  than  that  which  our  senses 
know,  but  to  show  something-  purely  spiritual  and 
moral  about  this  life.  Its  revelation  is  of  guilt 
or  of  duty  here  and  now,  not  of  a  promised  here- 
after. The  ghost  of  Hamlet's  father  exists  for 
Hamlet,  the  ghost  of  Banquo  for  Macbeth ;  they  exert 
a  further  pressure,  the  one  upon  a  feeling  of  responsi- 
bility, the  other  upon  a  feeling  of  guilt — which  feel- 
ings exist  already  as  products  of  causes  not  supernat- 
ural. And  so  it  is  everywhere  in  the  plays :  the  mean- 
ing is  the  same  whether  the  ghost  be  understood  by  the 
audience  as  having  an  objective  or  a- subjective  exist- 
ence. 

In  this  point  of  fundamental  meaning,  as  in  so 
many  other  points,  Shakspere  is  our  exact  contempo- 
rary. His  evident  sense  of  the  grossness  of  using 
ghostly  apparitions  to  prove  the  hereafter  is  like,  for 
example,  Mr.  Howells's  sense  of  the  same  fact  as  Mr. 
Howells  expresses  it  in  The  Undiscovered  Country 
and,  later,  in  The  Leatherwood  God.  The  Undiscov- 
ered Country  is  a  novel  about  the  phenomena  of 
"spiritualism"  which,  like  all  wise  novels  about  that 
theme,  comes  to  the  conclusion  that  such  phenomena, 
regardless  of  their  authenticity,  are  in  their  nature 
and  significance  wholly  irreligious.  Intelligence 
lapses  from  faith  in  it,  Dr.  Boynton  explains,  be- 
cause "it  is  not  spiritualism  at  all,  but  materialism, — 
a  grosser  materialism  than  that  which  denies;  a  ma- 
terialism that  asserts  and  affirms,  and  appeals  for 
proof  to  purely  physical  phenomena.  All  other  sys- 
tems of  belief,  all  other  revelations  of  the  unseen 


HUMANISM  227 

world,  have  supplied  a  rule  of  life,  have  been  given 
for  our  use  here.  But  this  offers  nothing  but  the  bar- 
ren fact  that  we  live  again.  If  it  has  had  any  effect 
upon  morals,  it  has  been  to  corrupt  them.  I  cannot 
see  how  it  is  better  in  its  effect  upon  this  world  than 
sheer  atheism.  It  is  as  thoroughly  godless  as  atheism 
itself,  and  no  man  can  accept  it  upon  any  other  man's 
word,  because  it  has  not  yet  shown  its  truth  in  the 
ameliorated  life  of  men.  It  leaves  them  where  it 
found  them,  or  else  a  little  worse  for  the  conceit  with 
which  it  fills  them."1  And  again:  ".  .  .  as  long 
as  it  is  used  merely  to  establish  the  fact  of  a  future 
life  it  will  remain  sterile.  It  will  continue  to  be 
doubted,  like  a  conjurer's  trick,  by  all  who  have  not 
seen  it;  and  those  who  see  it  will  afterwards  come  to 
discredit  their  own  senses.  The  world  has  been 
mocked  with  something  of  the  kind  from  the  be- 
ginning; it's  no  new  thing.  Perhaps  the  hope  of 
absolute  assurance  is  given  us  only  to  be  broken  for 
our  rebuke.  Life  is  not  so  long  at  the  longest  that 
we  need  be  impatient.  If  we  wake,  we  shall  know ;  if 
we  do  not  wake,  we  shall  not  even  know  that  we  have 
not  awakened.  .  .  .  'The  undiscovered  country  from 
whose  bourn  no  traveller  returns.'  .  .  .  and  Hamlet 
says  no  traveller  returns,  when  he  believes  that  he 
has  just  seen  his  father's  spirit!  The  ghost  that 
comes  back  to  prove  itself  can't  hold  him  to  a  belief 
in  its  presence  after  the  heated  moment  of  vision  is 
past !  We  must  doubt  it ;  we  are  better  with  no  proof. 
Yes;  yes!     The  undiscovered  country — thank  God,  it 

1  The  Undiscovered  Country,  Chapter  XXIV. 


228  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


can  be  what  these  babblers  say!  The  undiscovered: 
country — what  a  weight  of  doom  is  in  the  words — 
and  hope ! "  1 

Dr.  Boyuton's  modern  humanistic  notion  of  religion 
and  of  its  meaning  in  no  wise  shifts  the  accent  of 
Shakspere.  How  could  there  be  a  more  sweeping 
illustration  of  Shakspere 's  success  in  making  his 
works  embody  a  philosophy  which  is  all  things  to  all 
men,  in  which  all  the  creeds  and  all  the  doubts  forget 
their  differences  and  meet  at  a  common  centre  ?  This 
alone,  of  all  possible  interpretations,  abolishes  the 
question  whether  he  was  orthodox  or  heretical,  and 
places  its  accent  on  the  one  indubitable  reality  be- 
longing to  universal  ideas:  the  reality  derived,  not 
from  their  source  or  their  absolute  truth,  but  from 
their  knowable  effects  on  human  imagination  and  wif. 


Some  such  things  I  believe  that  Shakspere  believed. 
At  all  events  the  plays,  so  interpreted,  contain  the 
most  utter  truth  with  the  least  arguable  matter. 
And  if  that  be  true,  we  cannot  doubt  the  right  to  its 
place  of  the  philosophy  which  so  interprets  them. 
This  humanism,  putting  in  abeyance  all  the  questions 
to  which  there  is  no  final  answer,  and  content  to  dwell 
in  the  realm  of  knowable  things,  is  the  perfect  philos- 
ophy for  art;  for  it  alone  can  range  widely,  as  art 
must  do,  among  such  actualities  as  imagination  and 

i  The  Undiscovered  Country,  Chapter  XXIV. 


HUMANISM  229 

faith, — in  a  word,  all  the  more  spiritual  parts  of  our 
human  organization, — and  at  the  same  time  refrain, 
as  art  must  do,  from  postulating  an  objective  existence 
for  the  other-worldly  creations  of  imagination  and 
faith.  Humanism  makes  room  for  every  dream, 
every  hope ;  yet  it  leaves  humanity  and  the  human 
struggle  illustrious  enough  to  enthrall  us  for  their 
own  sakes,  as  they  cannot  do  under  a  creed  which 
makes  man  a  mere  footnote  to  the  rest  of  creation  or 
a  caprice  of  the  will  of  God. 

In  the  glare  of  light  which  this  reading  of  Shak- 
spere  throws  upon  the  nature  and  the  history  of  im- 
aginative fiction  we  can  decipher,  it  seems  to  me,  a 
broadly  complete  rationale  for  the  philosophy  therein. 
Humanism — a  philosophy,  if  one  insist,  made  out  of 
the  rejection  of  philosophies,  the  refusal  to  consider 
any  cosmic  doctrine  except  as  a  force  in  human  life — 
humanism  is  almost  a  synonym  of  the  artistic  temper 
itself;  because,  like  the  artistic  temper,  it  exalts  the 
self-sufficiency  of  the  real  without  limiting  its  bound- 
aries. By  the  same  logic,  the  other  possible  philo- 
sophies, supernaturalism  and  naturalism,  are  made 
to  fall  into  their  places  in  relation  to  art.  They  clash 
with  it  precisely  where  humanism  re-enforces  it ;  and 
their  centre  is  elsewhere  than  its  centre.  Super- 
naturalism  undermines  the  significance  of  that  reality 
which  is  necessarily  the  subject-matter  of  art  by  re- 
ducing our  temporal  life  to  an  infinitesimal  fraction  of 
the  cosmic  scheme ;  and  all  art  produced  under  it  has 
tacitly  the  nature  of  mere  diversion  or  beguilement, 
meet  for  hours  of  "moral  holiday"  perhaps,  but  in- 


230  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

herently  lacking  in  moral  dignity,  and  almost  frankly 
contravening  the  laws  of  the  universe  in  which  it  is 
conceived.  In  a  word,  supernaturalism  is  an  infirm 
motive  power  for  art  because  it  reduces  to  a  hollow 
pretence  the  necessary  assumption  of  art  that  the 
temporal  is  important ;  only  the  eternal  really  counts. 
And  naturalism,  to  which  man  is  only  a  "disease  of 
the  dust,"  has  also,  in  a  somewhat  different  way,  the 
defect  that  it  reduces  man  to  too  puny  a  stature  to 
be  greatly  tragic  or  comic.  But  still  more  it  has  the 
fault  of  belittling  the  spiritual  in  man  and  exalting 
proportionately  the  physical,  the  material.  And,  just 
as  supernaturalism  either  stifles  art  altogether  or  else 
treats  it  as  something  to  be  tolerated  along  with  other 
concessions  to  mortal  frailty,  so  naturalism  tends  to 
circumscribe  art  by  confining  it  to  "realism" — either 
the  foul  realism  of  those  who  are  panegyrists  of  the 
brute  in  man,  or  the  sterile  literalism  of  those  who 
report  what  is,  exhausting  the  material  facts  of  crea- 
tion and  ignoring  our  questions  about  the  possible 
sense  of  it.  Supernaturalism  refuses  to  take  art 
seriously  enough  to  justify  it ;  and  naturalism  refuses 
to  take  the  higher  faculties  of  man  seriously  enough 
to  let  art  justify  itself. 

In  actual  practice,  the  best  fiction  produced  under 
each  of  these  two  philosophies  has  been  saved  by  the 
failure  of  the  artist  to  take  his  philosophy  with  en- 
tire seriousness.  In  a  completely  naturalistic  world, 
probably  no  art  could  be  produced  at  all ;  for  natural- 
ism is  interested  in  the  results  which  are  most  logically 
and  visibly  the  effects  of  natural  law,  and  least  in- 


HUMANISM  231 

terested  in  civilization,  which  humanism  calls  "an 
organized  revolt  against  nature."  A  large  body  of 
naturalistic  fiction  is  written  to  belittle  those  very 
art-producing  faculties  to  which  it  is  indebted  for 
its  own  existence.  And  as  for  supernaturalism,  I 
suppose  it  obvious  that  of  the  century  of  novelists 
from  Fielding  to  Thackeray  very  few  applied  their 
faiths  more  seriously  to  the  business  of  writing  novels 
than  the  average  nominal  Christian  of  the  same  period 
applied  his  Christianity  to  the  business  of  daily  liv- 
ing; and  both  Fielding  and  Thackeray,  theoretically 
sound  moralists  though  they  are,  derive  from  the 
contemplation  of  human  naughtiness  an  impish  de- 
light which  must  greatly  have  perturbed  them  if  their 
theories  had  really  come  first. 

The  fact  seems  to  be,  then,  that  writers  who  were 
not  humanists  with  their  whole  minds  have  profited 
by  the  extent  to  which  they  were  unconscious  human- 
ists in  their  tastes — the  extent,  that  is,  to  which  their 
temperaments  failed  to  square  with  their  consciences. 
No  one  supposes  that  the  exquisite  high  comedy  of 
Jane  Austen  is  invalidated  by  the  failure  of  its  world 
to  show  any  particular  correspondence  with  the  ortho- 
doxy of  her  ultimate  beliefs;  or  that  Dickens's 
democratic  vaudeville  is  seriously  interfered  with  by 
his  Trinitarianism ;  or  that  Meredith's  criticism  of 
society  as  it  is  constituted  seems  less  momentous  be- 
cause he  was  in  part  a  mystical  optimist,  working 
from  a  belief  in  human  perfectibility  toward  no  less 
an  end  than  human  perfection.  These  facts,  examples 
of  the  clash  between  great  art  and  an  underlying 


232  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


philosophy  which  does  not  help  explain  its  greatness, 
are  sometimes  alleged  as  proofs  that  philosophy  has 
nothing  to  say  to  art.  What  they  really  prove  is  that 
no  other  philosophy  than  humanism  is  tenable  in  the 
work  of  fiction.  They  reaffirm  concretely  the  points 
here  asserted  theoretically :  the  failure  of  naturalism 
and  of  supernaturalism  to  locate  their  centres  of 
interest  where  fiction  must  locate  its  centre,  and  the 
coincidence  at  every  point  of  the  humanistic  doctrine 
with  the  artistic  feeling.  It  is  inevitable  that  some- 
thing should  be  withdrawn  from  the  sanction  and  the 
dignity  of  art  in  conditions  where  it  cannot  exist  in 
whole-hearted  fidelity  to  the  belief  which  nominally 
engenders  it;  and  this  withdrawal  is  one  meaning  of 
our  ancestors'  prolonged  distrust  of  the  novel  on 
moral  and  religious  grounds,  and  of  an  odd  parallel 
to  that  distrust  in  the  patronizing  condescension  to- 
ward the  arts  in  our  modern  world  of  naturalistic 
belief  used  to  enthrone  material  competition. 

A  point  to  close  on,  for  re-enforcement  of  the  argu- 
ment about  the  inclusiveness  of  humanism,  is  this: 
However  sceptically  one  may  regard  the  utter  self- 
identification  of  art  with  a  particular  way  of  thinking 
about  the  sense  of  creation,  at  least  one  can  see  the 
legitimacy  of  ideas  in  fiction  as  objects,  as  material. 
Even  the  unmoralist  in  aesthetics  has  only  to  be  in- 
terested in  seeing  fiction  enlarge  its  province  and  its 
powers,  in  order  to  perceive  that  the  novel  must  treat 
any  and  all  ideas  as  soon  as  it  becomes  interested  in 
protagonists  who  hold  them.  Four  names  will  serve 
roughly  to  show  the  acquisitiveness  of  fiction.    Defoe 


HUMANISM  233 

investigated  the  physical  life,  actions;  Richardson 
added  the  emotional  life,  sensibilities ;  George  Eliot 
the  moral  life,  conscience ;  and  Meredith,  our  modern 
of  moderns  in  this  particular  among  others,  the  in- 
tellectual life — ideas.  Meredith  identifies  himself  un- 
reservedly with  certain  general  ideas :  a  kind  of  pagan 
optimism,  a  kind  of  nobly  unfaddish  feminism,  a  set  of 
prerequisites  to  the  existence  of  a  perfect  society, 
a  faithful  acceptance  of  the  evolutionary  and  biologi- 
cal unity  of  all  things.  He  would  have  been  glad  to 
stand  or  fall  by  the  validity  of  those  ideas.  Yet  en- 
sues the  paradox  that  Meredith  stands  though  the 
ideas  fall,  simply  because  he  made  his  novels  so  search- 
ing a  record  of  how  some  distinguished  and  unique 
minds  did  actually  think.  The  novels  remain  as 
humanistic  embodiments  of  important  realities,  even 
if  they  pass  as  an  apologia  for  Meredith's  own  mysti- 
cal optimism. 

At  this  point  of  his  achievement  Meredith  reaches 
the  stature  of  the  grandest  humanists,  including 
Shakspere.  For  he  had  a  comprehensive  enough  mind 
to  make  his  works  last  for  what  is  in  them,  no  matter 
what  should  become  of  the  reasons  behind  them.  This 
greatest  triumph  of  the  artist  is  also  the  logical  con- 
summation of  the  humanist. 


IX 

DESIGN 


If  I  have  succeeded  in  making  a  just  account  of 
the  place  which  properly  belongs  to  philosophy  in 
fiction,  I  have  brought  out  at  the  same  time  the  most 
cogent  of  the  reasons  why  the  shape  of  fiction  as  an 
art  has  undergone  certain  marked  changes  during  the 
past  half  century.  Up  to  1859  roughly — the  year  of 
the  first  novel  of  George  Eliot,  and  a  date  which  has 
in  the  history  of  fiction  something  of  the  momentous- 
ness  which  we  ascribe  to  it  in  that  of  science — the 
philosophy  in  fiction  is  felt  either  as  an  intruder  or 
as  a  guest  whose  presence  is  hardly  suspected  at  all; 
though,  as  I  tried  to  show,  that  unsuspected  presence 
is  more  advantage  than  disadvantage.  Probably  all 
of  us  do,  whether  we  know  it  or  not,  have  a  philosophy, 
even  if  only  a  philosophy  of  negations ;  and,  having  it, 
we  perforce  look  at  the  world  through  it.  This  un- 
awareness  is  the  attitude  of  the  drama  and  of  the 
novel  before  George  Eliot — except,  of  course,  in 
homiletic,  allegorical,  or  symbolistic  pieces  such  as 
The  Life  and  Death  of  Mr.  B adman  or  Kasselas. 
But  from  the  time  of  George  Eliot  the  philosophy  in 
fiction  is  intensely  aware  of  itself,  determined  to  make 
the  most  of  itself  as  an  opportunity,  not  merely  put 
up  with  itself  as  a  necessity.  And  from  the  moment 
of  this  conscious  acceptance  and  welcome  of  phil- 
osophy, an  entirely  new  set  of  considerations  begins 

237 


238  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

to  govern  the  shape  of  fiction.  The  novel,  whenever 
it  deserved  its  hold  on  us,  has  always  combined  truth 
with  pleasure;  but  when  the  emphasis  shifted  from- 
pleasure  to  truth,  there  appeared  a  new  determining 
principle  of  inclusion  and  exclusion,  a  new  standard 
of  criticism  for  the  devices  and  expedients  which 
fiction  had  evolved  during  its  vassalage  to  pleasure. 
I  can  best  state  the  change  as  an  enormous  decrease 
of  the  accidental  and  arbitrary,  and  a  corresponding 
increase  of  the  causal.  The  shortest  name  for  the 
transition  is  George  Eliot,  who  was  doing  perhaps  her 
best  work  during  the  life  of  Thackeray,  and  nearly 
all  of  her  work  during  the  life  of  Dickens,  but  who 
is  animated  by  a  more  modern  spirit  than  either. 
George  Eliot  represents  the  universe  naturally  con- 
ceived as  an  organism ;  man  as  a  subordinated  unit  of 
its  evolution  and  not,  philosophically,  the  pivot  of  the 
whole;  the  intricate  dovetailing  of  cause  and  effect 
everywhere ;  the  facts  of  good  and  evil  as  products  of 
remote  and  invisible  causes  in  heredity  and  environ- 
ment; the  ungovernable  sway  of  chance  in  human 
lives,  reducing  them,  whether  it  destroy  or  fulfil,  to 
mere  pawns  in  an  inscrutable  game; — in  fine,  the 
character  which  is  fate  and  the  fate  which  is  above 
character.  To  express  with  any  fulness  this  duality 
of  the  world  and  the  individual,  she  must  abandon 
the  worn  machinery  of  coincidence  and  mystery,  the 
various  wires  and  levers  by  which  the  novelist  himself 
remains  palpably  in  control  of  his  spectacle ;  she  must 
substitute  for  these  the  machinery  of  human  will  and 
natural  forces.     To  begin  with,  she  must  have  a  nar- 


DESIGN  239 


row  scene,  where  nature  itself  reduces  life  to  a  man- 
ageable simplicity;  and  hence  she  follows  the  pro- 
vincial ideal  by  which  Jane  Austen  so  unconsciously 
profited — how  wondrously  we  know  when  we  stop  to 
think  that  we  are  now  only  just  learning  how  high, 
even  if  how  small,  is  the  place  rightfully  hers.  Then, 
she  must  study  not  merely  the  actions  of  men  and 
women :  she  must  study  the  directions  of  their  lives, 
the  corrosion  of  character  by  its  worst  or  weakest, 
all  the  implications  of  her  accustomed  theme,  "the 
idealist  in  search  of  a  vocation";  and  hence  she  must 
reduce  the  number  of  events  until  none  remain  ex- 
cept those  which  have  profound  importance  as  illus- 
trating the  direction  of  the  lives  concerned — the 
episodes  are  reduced  in  number,  and  mean  individu- 
ally more.  Finally,  she  must  investigate  not  only  the 
physical  realities  of  actions  and  the  emotions  that 
underlie  them,  but  the  moral  principles  that  underlie 
emotion  and  choice;  she  must  go  more  deeply  than 
the  novel  has  been  wont  to  go  into  the  moral  and  in- 
tellectual life  of  her  protagonists,  in  order  to  bring 
forth  by  reflection  and  analysis  those  realities  which 
can  be  expressed  but  imperfectly,  or  not  at  all,  in 
action ;  whence  Savonarola  in  his  cell,  Bulstrode  on 
his  knees.  This  patient  and  fruitful  search  for  the 
causality  in  life  is  the  distinguishing  contribution  of 
George  Eliot  to  the  novel. 

In  her  we  see,  then,  at  least  three  significant 
changes  in  the  shape  of  the  novel,  changes  which  it 
has  mostly  retained  and  intensified  since  the  con- 
clusion of  her  work :  first,  the  narrow  scene,  appointed 


240  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

for  rigorous  specialization  in  a  few  persona?;  sec- 
ondly, the  elimination  of  deliberate  artifice  in  the 
manufacture  of  plots,  and  the  attempt  instead  to 
bring  the  action  out  of  the  persona?  and  the  clash  of 
their  wills  and  personalities ;  thirdly,  enlargement  of 
the  scope  and  importance  of  analysis  of  motives  and 
feelings. 

That  such  are  indeed  the  chief  traits  of  George 
Eliot  as  a  novelist  is  shown  by  our  instinctive 
objection  to  her  few  lapses  into  the  factitious  and  the 
accidental.  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  says  of  a  certain 
episode  in  Romola:  "Poor  Romola,  in  her  despair, 
gets  into  a  miscellaneous  boat  lying  ashore;  and  the 
boat  drifts  away  in  a  manner  rarely  practised  by  boats 
in  real  life,  and  spontaneously  lands  her  in  a  place 
where  everybody  is  dying  of  the  plague,  and  she  can 
therefore  make  herself  useful  to  her  fellow-creatures. 
She  clearly  ought  to  have  been  drowned,  like  Maggie, 
and  we  feel  that  Providence  is  made  to  interfere 
rather  awkwardly."1  We  all  share  the  feeling;  but 
it  is  a  feeling  which  we  should  never  experience  with 
the  same  force  in  connection  with  Dickens  or  Thack- 
eray— writers  from  whom  we  expect  a  full  measure 
of  everything  that  can  by  any  possibility  be  put  into 
the  work  of  fiction.  That  we  should  have  the  feeling 
in  connection  with  such  palpable  contrivances  in 
George  Eliot  as  this  extraordinary  boat  of  Romola 's, 
shows  in  itself  how  essentially  the  novel  had  altered 
its  shape  by  1864 — how  unmistakably  the  philosophi- 

i  George  Eliot  (English  Men  of  Letters  Series).  By  Leslie 
Stephen.     New  York:  The  Macmillan  Company.     P.  138. 


DESIGN  241 


cal  point  of  view  had  even  then  brought  about  the 
modern  change  from  the  casual  to  the  causal. 


II 


This  general  change  that  has  come  over  the  form  of 
the  novel  is,  then,  the  substitution  of  a  higher  unity 
for  a  lower.  The  effect  of  naturalistic  philosophy  in 
the  novel  is  to  re-open  the  whole  question  of  the  de- 
vices and  subterfuges  of  the  novel  in  their  relation 
to  the  integrity  of  the  whole ;  to  re-open  it  as  a  sub- 
ordinate phase  of  our  other  inclusive  question,  the 
relation  of  art  to  life.  Only  with  the  ascendancy  of 
naturalism  did  the  novel  attain  any  philosophy  of 
art  to  speak  of;  and  it  is  only  with  the  attainment  of 
a  philosophy  of  art  that  the  novel  makes  its  transition 
from  artifice  to  truth — stops  asking  "What  will  be 
effective,  how  can  the  attention  be  won  and  stimu- 
lated?" and  begins  to  ask  "How  best  can  truth  be 
served,  the  nature  of  things  unravelled?"  I  do  not 
mean  of  course  that  the  matter  of  pure  strategy  in  the 
novel  can  be  ignored,  for  if  the  story  does  not  capture 
our  interest  it  can  certainly  do  nothing  to  us  at  all: 
but  the  emphasis  becomes  transferred  from  one  of 
these  questions  to  the  other,  and  the  question  of 
technique  in  the  novel  is  being  elevated  along  with 
the  purpose  and  meaning  of  the  novel  as  a  whole. 

In  one  way  it  may  even  be  said  that  questions  of 
technique  become  all  the  while  more  important  and 
more  exacting ;  for  the  modern  notion  of  truth-telling 


242  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


cuts  off  all  those  resources  of  palpable  contrivance  in 
technique  upon  which  so  much  of  the  plot-interest 
depends  in  Fielding  and  Dickens.  And  the  result  is 
that  the  modern  practitioner  must  have,  in  one  par- 
ticular at  least,  a  fuller  equipment  than  these;  for 
he  must  know  how  to  win  and  hold  the  interest  with- 
out such  aids  through  the  historical,  the  conventional, 
and  simply  by  the  amount  and  value  of  the  truth  he 
finds  to  tell.  This  elevation  of  the  whole  problem 
of  expedients  and  devices  in  the  novel  means,  as  I 
have  said,  the  substitution  of  a  higher  unity  for  a 
lower.  Unity  of  purpose  takes  the  place  once  held  by 
the  unity  of  trickery  and  elaborate  organization.  It 
would  hardly  be  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  natural- 
ism makes  the  same  difference  in  the  novel  as  in  our 
conception  of  the  world :  it  replaces  arbitrary  crea- 
tion by  the  organic  evolution  of  a  thing  which  grows 
into  certain  forms  by  its  own  inward  nature,  as  it 
were  by  a  kind  of  self-compulsion. 

It  would  be  interesting  but  futile  to  speculate  how 
far  and  with  what  consistency  these  changes  could 
have  been  followed  out  in  the  novel  without  Con- 
tinental influences.  The  history  of  these  changes 
since  George  Eliot  is,  as  a  fact,  largely  an  affair  of 
comparative  literature ;  for  it.  is  evident  that  the  novel 
in  France  and,  presently,  the  novel  in  Russia  did 
incalculably  much  to  furnish  both  the  ideal  and  the 
means. 

So  far  as  I  can  express  the  difference  between  these 
two  influences,  it  lies  in  the  more  fundamental  sim- 
plicity and  naivete  of  the  Russian  masters,  the  more 


DESIGN  243 


sophisticated  and  more  technical  proficiency  of  the 
French.  It  is  as  though  the  French  had  achieved 
unity  as  a  purely  artistic  triumph,  because  of  a  com- 
pulsion to  exhaust  the  possibilities  of  order,  sym- 
metry, and  austere  perfection  as  things  desirable  and 
matchless  in  themselves;  whereas  the  Russians 
achieved  it  through  a  compelling  need  of  reducing 
everything  to  an  elemental  simplicity,  for  the  sake 
of  getting  outside  it,  mastering  it:  one  feels  the  Rus- 
sian temperament  as  less  various  and  more  strong, 
more  tenacious  and  less  nimble.  While  Flaubert  and 
Maupassant  were  achieving  unity  by  whittling  down 
their  subject  to  essentials,  ruling  out  all  that  failed  to 
contribute  to  its  predetermined  harmony,  Turgenev 
and  Dostoevski  were  achieving  unity  by  relating  their 
larger  masses  of  data  to  some  central  and  magnetic 
principle  of  truth.  The  French  temper  is  to  pick  and 
choose,  and  then  weave  carefully  the  chosen  elements 
together  into  a  pattern;  the  Russian  temper  is  to 
take  everything  there  is  to  take,  and  put  it  into  a 
.single  basket  large  and  strong  enough  to  carry  it  all. 
And  so,  while  the  70 's  and  '80 's  saw  British  novel- 
ists learning  something  of  their  technique  in  France, 
it  also  saw  them  learning  perhaps  even  more  of  the 
rationale  of  technique  in  Russia.  Mr.  Howells  and 
Henry  James,  greatly  as  they  were  soon  to  differ  in 
their  use  of  what  they  learned,  did  beyond  question 
learn  much,  and  derive  a  permanent  impetus  in  cer- 
tain modern  directions,  first  from  Balzac,  and  then 
from  Turgenev — to  name  only  the  most  representa- 
tive of  influences, 


244  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

The  distinction  between  French  and  Russian  art 
is  perhaps  not  so  absolute  as  I  have  made  it  sound: 
what  distinction  ever  is  so  absolute  as  one's  account 
of  it?  But  there  is,  I  think,  a  measurable  truth  in 
my  general  point,  that  the  Russian  character  has  the 
greater  capacity  for  obsession,  the  greater  need  to  see 
all  reality  for  the  time  being  through  a  single  pair 
of  spectacles,  the  greater  capacity  to  be  interested  in 
everything.  And  what  I  wish  mainly  to  point  out 
is  this:  that  by  the  middle  '90 's,  when  one  of  these 
Continental  influences  was  at  its  culmination  and  the 
other  was  at  least  beginning  to  exert  its  leverage, 
then,  in  the  decade  when  the  names  now  most  ac- 
credited were  just  beginning  to  appear  on  title-pages, 
the  modern  novel  in  English  had  pretty  well  deter- 
mined its  present  bent  toward  the  Russian  largeness, 
the  Russian  inclusiveness.  Our  younger  novelists  had 
learned  from  France  certain  of  the  line  fitnesses  of 
treatment,  of  order;  they  had  learned  from  Russia, 
through  France,  to  practise  these  upon  larger  and 
more  specialized  pieces  of  subject  matter  than  the 
French  masters  since  Victor  Hugo  have  commonly 
treated. 

That,  on  the  whole,  this  choice  of  emphasis  between 
two  influences  has  resulted  to  the  advantage  of  the 
novel,  I  may  perhaps  suggest  by  bare  statement  of 
two  considerations:  first,  that  the  Russian  inclusive- 
ness of  matter  and  of  event  is  most  like  the  Victorian 
inclusiveness  which  is  our  chief  tradition  in  the  novel, 
so  that  full  adoption  of  the  French  method  and  ideal 
might  have  meant,  relatively,  the  impoverishment  of 


DESIGN  245 


the  novel;  secondly,  that  the  largest  possible  inter- 
pretation of  what  is  relevant  to  the  subject  of  a  novel 
best  serves  our  modern  notion  of  life's  complexity, 
and  gives  the  novelist  his  best  chance  of  seeing  life 
steadily  and  whole.  In  1895  British  fiction  had  its 
choice  of  whether  it  should  see  highly  specialized 
specimens  of  life  and  make  of  each  a  perfect  picture, 
or  consider  highly  representative  and  typical  speci- 
mens of  life  and  see  them  with  a  single  eye.  The 
problem  was  unity  by  selection  versus  unity  by  in- 
terpretation. Our  novelists  mainly  chose  to  interpret 
large  segments  of  the  typical ;  and  on  the  whole  the 
developments  in  the  form  of  the  novel  during  the 
twenty  years  since  that  choice  crystallized  have  shown 
that  they  did  well. 


Ill 


Suppose  we  consider  separately,  for  a  moment,  these 
two  lessons  which  the  English  novel  was  trying  to 
learn  in  the  last  quarter-century  of  Victoria 's  reign — 
the  French  lesson  of  unity  through  internal  fitness  or 
congruity,  the  Russian  lesson  of  unity  through  the 
insistence  upon  a  centralizing  and  directing  purpose. 
Of  the  details  of  that  first  lesson  learned  in  Paris, 
we  can  name  and  illustrate  three  of  some  technical 
importance. 

The  first  is  oneness  of  tone  or  pitch— the  necessity 
of  keying  all  the  parts  of  a  given  subject  within  an 
emotional  gamut  which  does  no  violence  to  the  read- 
er's sensibilities.     If  we  desire  an  interesting  example 


246  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


of  work  performed  under  the  most  conscientious  and 
single-minded  zeal  for  such  oneness,  we  have  it  in 
Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch's  completion  of  Stevenson's 
unfinished  St,  Ives — a  task  executed  with  such  loving 
circumspection  that  one  can  not  tell,  by  internal  evi- 
dence, where  the  break  occurs.  That  Stevenson  would 
have  appreciated  this  beautiful  competence  shown  in 
imitation  of  his  style  is  proved  by  his  sensitiveness 
to  every  one  of  his  own  failures  adequately  to  imitate 
himself.  Speaking  of  an  earlier  and  slighter  work, 
Prince  Otto,  he  says  in  a  letter  to  C.  W.  Stoddard: 

"How  does  your  class  get  along?  If  you  like  to 
touch  on  Otto,  any  day  in  a  by-hour,  you  may  tell 
them — as  the  author's  last  dying  confession — that  it 
is  a  strange  example  of  the  difficulty  of  being  ideal 
in  an  age  of  realism;  that  the  unpleasant  giddy- 
mindedness,  which  spoils  the  book  and  often  gives  it 
a  wanton  air  of  unreality  and  juggling  with  air- 
bells,  comes  from  unsteadiness  of  key;  from  the  too 
great  realism  of  some  chapters  and  passages — some 
of  which  I  have  now  spotted,  others  I  dare  say  I 
shall  never  spot — which  disprepares  the  imagination 
for  the  cast  of  the  remainder. 

"Any  story  can  be  made  true  in  its  own  key;  any 
story  can  be  made  false  by  the  choice  of  a  wrong  key 
of  detail  or  style :  Otto  is  made  to  reel  like  a  drunken 
— I  was  going  to  say  man,  but  let  us  substitute 
cipher — by  the  variations  of  the  key."1 

In  this  informal  comment  Stevenson,  a  Scott  with 

i  The  Letters  of  Robert  Louis  Htevenson,  Vol.   II,  p.   321. 
New  York:   Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1911. 


DESIGN  247 


a  French  artistic  conscience,  proves  how  unquestion- 
ing he  assumed  that  the  modern  sense  for  unity  of 
texture  is  necessary,  not  only  to  realism,  but  also  to 
work  done  in  a  romantic  tradition.  There  is  a  kind 
of  story  which,  if  it  is  to  exist  at  all,  demands  that 
the  hero  shall  be  invulnerable;  there  is  a  kind  of 
modern  costume  romance  in  which  it  is  strictly  proper 
that  the  last  chapter  shall  show  the  hero  converted  to 
the  religion  of  the  majority.  Perhaps  one  does  better 
not  to  write  that  kind  of  romance;  but  if  one  does 
write  it  one  must  keep  it  in  tune  with  itself,  even  at 
the  cost  of  admitting  conventions  which  are  in  them- 
selves silly.  In  their  own  irresponsible  realm,  the 
coincidences  and  mystifications  of  Wilkie  Collins  are 
not  only  justifiable  but  inevitable;  The  Woman  in 
White  and  The  Moonstone  may  not  be  fiction  of  a 
high  order,  but  they  are  at  least  consistent  with  them- 
selves, and  works  of  art  in  so  far  as  they  are  of  their 
own  kind.  In  short,  there  is  no  art  without  form ; 
and,  for  modern  purposes,  form  is  fusion. 

This  general  truth  becomes  still  more  manifest  as  I 
approach  a  second  and  more  specific  agent  of  unity, 
the  single  point  of  view.  It  is  not  enough  that  the 
material  reported  upon  be  consonant  with  itself:  it 
must  harmonize  with  the  person  who  reports  it, 
whether  that  person  be  the  author  himself  reporting 
omnisciently, — a  method  which  obviously  suffers  from 
lack  of  verisimilitude,  since  no  one  can  reasonably  be 
expected  to  know  all  the  facts  or  be  everywhere  at 
once, — or  an  observer  created  by  the  author  expressly 
to  observe,  or  a  character  in  the  story.     The  omniscient 


248  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

method  tends  to  disappear,  as  we  should  expect  it  to 
in  a  period  when  the  novelist  finds  his  reward  in  the 
meanings  of  facts  rather  than  in  knowledge  of  the 
facts  themselves.  We  no  longer  see  the  novelist 
"stand  about  in  his  scene,  talking  it  over  with  his 
hands  in  his  pockets,  interrupting  the  action,  and 
spoiling  the  illusion  in  which  alone  the  truth  of  art 
resides, "  1  as  Mr.  Howells  says  of  Thackeray 's  and 
Trollope's  habit  of  personally  conducting  the  story. 
The  novelist  who  can  be  in  all  places  at  once  and  fol- 
low simultaneous  actions  going  on  apart  from  each 
other  is  too  palpably  the  inventor  of  his  facts;  and, 
as  a  result  of  this  feeling  about  him,  we  see  the  sub- 
plot practically  disappear  from  modern  fiction,  and 
the  action  reduce  itself  to  so  much  as  can  be  compre- 
hended from  a  single  human  point  of  view  working 
under  the  ordinary  human  limitations.  We  are  in- 
terested, not  in  the  mechanism  of  complex  actions,  but 
in  the  moral  causes  and  effects  of  actions  as  shown  in 
a  life  or  a  few  lives  followed  continuously.  The  cul- 
mination of  this  interest  thus  far  appears  in  the  later 
novels  and  tales  of  Henry  James,  all  of  which  are 
interpreted  for  us  through  the  observing  consciousness 
of  some  person,  not  the  author,  who  is  present  in  the 
story.  To  these  we  may  add  the  more  recent  prac- 
tice of  the  direct  colloquial  method  in  some  of  the 
best  work  of  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad. 

Thirdly,  the  modern  craftsman  has  learned  that 
there  must  be  fusion  among  the  various  agents  of  the 

i  Criticism,  and  Fiction,  p.  76.     New  York:   Harper  &  Bros. 
MDCCCXCII1. 


DESIGN  249 


narrative  process — the  talk  and  action,  the  portrait- 
painting  and  characterization,  which  go  to  make  up 
the  actual  written  story.  We  have  learned  that  the 
one  of  these  elements  which  predominated  in  the 
earlier  Victorians  and  in  Scott,  and  which  has  latterly- 
threatened  to  reduce  our  magazine  fiction  to  a  bare 
skeleton  of  dialogue — we  have  learned  that  the  ele- 
ment of  talk  is  the  thinnest,  most  meagre  of  all  in  real 
and  lasting  communicativeness.  Even  when  talk  is 
sifted  down  to  the  printable  economy  and  compact- 
ness, we  require  a  bushel  of  it  to  convey  what  the 
novelist's  own  interpretation  of  his  facts  can  give  us 
in  a  tenth  of  the  room;  and  the  narrator  whose 
dialogue  is  his  principal  stock-in  -trade  is  not  only 
copying  the  merits  of  the  drama  in  conditions  where 
they  become  positive  defects,  but  he  is  also  crowding 
out  "the  golden  blocks  themselves  of  the  structure" — 
his  own  weighed,  condensed,  and  reflective  analysis. 
This  complaint  is  one  that  Henry  James,  whose  sense 
for  such  things  was  of  the  most  subtly  critical,  had 
often  to  urge  as  his  principal  criticism  of  Mr. 
Howells's  technique;  and  in  one  of  his  London  Notes  1 
he  urged  it  with  even  more  force  against  the  decidedly 
inferior  dialogue  of  Gissing. 

This  third  point  is  interestingly  argued  by  Scott 
in  his  Preface  to  The  Bride  of  Lammermoor,  in  an 
imaginary  conversation  between  Pattieson  the  novel- 
ist and  Dick  Tinto  the  painter.  Scott  inclined  on  the 
whole  to  Pattieson 's  view  of  talk  as  against  descrip- 

i  Notes  on  Novelists,  pp.  441-43.  New  York:  Charles 
Scribner's  Sons.     1914. 


250  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


tion ;  but  the  modern  artist,  who  has  more  reasons 
than  Scott  had  for  wishing  to  weave  a  firm  pattern, 
and  no  reasons  for  wishing  to  weave  one  of  loose  ends, 
agrees  almost  completely  with  Tinto. — 

"  'Your  characters,'  he  said,  'my  dear  Pattieson, 
make  too  much  use  of  the  gob  box;  they  patter  too 
much' — an  elegant  phraseology,  which  Dick  had 
learned  while  painting  the  scenes  of  an  itinerant  com- 
pany of  players — 'there  is  nothing  in  whole  pages  but 
mere  chat  and  dialogue.' 

"  'The  ancient  philosopher,'  said  I  in  reply,  'was 
wont  to  say, ' '  Speak,  that  I  may  know  thee ' ' ;  and  how 
is  it  possible  for  an  author  to  introduce  his  personce 
dramatis  to  his  readers  in  a  more  interesting  and  ef- 
fectual manner,  than  by  the  dialogue  in  which  each 
is  represented  as  supporting  his  own  appropriate  char- 
acter ? ' 

"  'It  is  a  false  conclusion,'  said  Tinto ;  'I  hate  it, 
Peter,  as  I  hate  an  unfilled  cann.  I  will  grant  you, 
indeed,  that  speech  is  a  faculty  of  some  value  in  the 
intercourse  of  human  affairs,  and  I  will  not  even 
insist  on  the  doctrine  of  that  Pythagorean  toper,  who 
was  of  opinion  that,  over  a  bottle,  speaking  spoiled 
conversation.  But  I  will  not  allow  that  a  professor 
of  the  fine  arts  has  occasion  to  embody  the  idea  of  his 
scene  in  language,  in  order  to  impress  upon  the 
reader  its  reality  and  its  effect.  On  the  contrary,  I 
will  be  judged  by  most  of  your  readers,  Peter,  should 
these  tales  ever  become  public,  whether  you  have  not 
given  us  a  page  of  talk  for  every  single  idea  which 


DESIGN  251 


two  words  might  have  communicated,  while  the  pos- 
ture, and  manner,  and  incident,  accurately  drawn, 
and  brought  out  by  appropriate  colouring,  would  have 
preserved  all  that  was  worthy  of  preservation,  and 
saved  these  everlasting  said  he's  and  said  she's,  with 
which  it  has  been  your  pleasure  to  encumber  your 
pages.' 

"I  replied,  'That  he  confounded  the  operations  of 
the  pencil  and  the  pen ;  that  the  serene  and  silent  art, 
as  painting  has  been  called  by  one  of  our  first  living 
poets,  necessarily  appealed  to  the  eye,  because  it  had 
not  the  organs  for  addressing  the  ear;  whereas  poetry, 
or  that  species  of  composition  which  approached  to 
it,  lay  under  the  necessity  of  doing  absolutely  the 
reverse,  and  addressed  itself  to  the  ear,  for  the  pur- 
pose of  exciting  that  interest  which  it  could  not  at- 
tain through  the  medium  of  the  eye.' 

"Dick  was  not  a  whit  staggered  by  my  argument, 
which  he  contended  was  founded  on  misrepresenta- 
tion. 'Description,'  he  said,  'was  to  the  author  of  a 
romance  exactly  what  drawing  and  tinting  were  to 
a  painter;  words  were  his  colours,  and,  if  properly 
employed,  they  could  not  fail  to  place  the  scene, 
which  he  wished  to  conjure  up,  as  effectually  before 
the  mind's  eye,  as  the  tablet  or  canvas  presents  it  to 
the  bodily  organ.  The  same  rules,'  he  contended, 
'applied  to  both,  and  an  exuberance  of  dialogue,  in 
the  former  case,  was  a  verbose  and  laborious  mode  of 
composition  which  went  to  confound  the  proper  art  of 
fictitious  narrative  with  that  of  the  drama,  a  widely 


252  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

different  species  of  composition,  of  which  dialogue 
was  the  very  essence,  because  all,  excepting  the 
language  to  be  made  use  of,  was  presented  to  the  eye 
by  the  dresses,  and  persons,  and  actions  of  the  per- 
formers upon  the  stage.  But  as  nothing,'  said  Dick, 
'can  be  more  dull  than  a  long  narrative  written  upon 
the  plan  of  a  drama,  so  where  you  have  approached 
most  near  to  that  species  of  composition,  by  indulging 
in  prolonged  scenes  of  mere  conversation,  the  course 
of  your  story  has  become  chill  and  constrained,  and 
you  have  lost  the  power  of  arresting  the  attention 
and  exciting  the  imagination,  in  which  upon  other 
occasions  you  ma}7  be  considered  as  having  succeeded 
tolerably  well.' 

"I  made  my  bow  in  requital  of  the  compliment, 
which  was  probably  thrown  in  by  way  of  placebo,  and 
expressed  myself  willing  at  least  to  make  one  trial 
of  a  more  straightforward  style  of  composition,  in 
which  my  actors  should  do  more,  and  say  less,  than 
in  my  former  attempts  of  this  kind.  .  .  ."  x 

Scott's  use  of  this  last  concession  in  The  Bride  of 
Lammermoor,  where  he  seems  really  to  make  a  con- 
scious attempt  at  repairing  the  proportions  of  his 
earlier  work,  may  go  farther  than  is  commonly  per- 
ceived toward  accounting  for  the  peculiar  distinction 
of  this  most  lyrical  of  his  tales;  though  it  still  re- 
mains odd  that  Scott  could  be  on  the  whole  so  in- 
different a  practitioner  of  that  which  he  so  shrewdly 
perceived  and  argued. 

i  From  the  "Preliminary"  of  the  Introduction  to  The  Bride 
of  Lammermoor. 


DESIGN  253 


IV 


So  far  I  speak  of  a  general  ideal  of  craftsmanship 
which  is  more  French  than  English,  and  of  some  of 
its  practical  effects  on  English  fiction.  Now  let  us 
see  what  was  the  general  effect  of  the  Russians.  We 
shall  find  it  to  have  been  sweeping;  for  it  resulted 
in  the  creation  of  a  strikingly  new  form  in  fiction,  a 
form  which  we  may  take  the  risk  of  calling  the  novel 
of  the  future.  At  all  events  it  is  the  novel  of  the 
present,  and  decidedly  not  the  novel  of  the  past.  It 
is  a  form  which  has  evolved,  not  from  the  novel  alone, 
but  from  the  novel  and  the  short  story — both  assimi- 
lated in  a  certain  way  under  the  mediation  of  some 
modern  ideas,  and  under  the  intervention,  as  it  seems 
to  me,  of  direct  influences  from  Russia. 

The  novel  of  the  past,  as  we  know,  formed  itself  by 
an  ideal  of  dramatic  structure,  with  a  crisis  at  or 
after  the  middle — at  all  events  far  enough  from  the 
end  so  that  there  could  be  a  definite  change  of  direc- 
tion in  the  plot.  That  is,  the  crisis  served  as  a  new 
initial  impulse,  from  which  the  action  proceeded  un- 
der changed  conditions  to  its  end.  Romola,  which  I 
have  named  already  in  a  different  connection,  is  an 
orthodox  example  of  the  dramatic  structure  carried 
out  on  a  vast  scale.  Romola 's  life  of  struggle  pro- 
ceeds in  a  certain  direction  and  toward  certain  ends 
until  the  events  which  involve  the  deaths  of  her  hus- 
band and  her  god-father  and  her  flight  from  the 
city;  then  it  proceeds  in  an  entirely  different  direc- 


254  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

tion  through  the  stages  of  her  effort  to  re-plan  her 
life  and  make  a  new  place  for  herself.  This  is  the 
general  contour  of  the  older  conventional  novel,  as  of 
the  drama;  and  the  short  story  differs  from  it  chiefly 
in  that  it  has  no  change  of  direction,  but  follows  its 
theme  straightforwardly  to  a  crisis  which  is  also  the 
end.  The  older  novel  was  two  stories,  or  a  story  and 
its  sequel ;  the  short  story  is  one  story,  cumulative  in 
its  effect. 

The  new  novel  is  a  sublimated  short  story.  It  avails 
itself  of  the  novel 's  fulness  of  treatment ;  it  may  run 
to  any  length,  even  the  inordinate  length  of  the  Vic- 
torian novels;  but  its  theme  is  single,  and  it  aims  at 
rigid  unity  of  effect — the  unity  which  comes  of  one 
direction  inexorably  followed,  and  the  use  of  all  the 
material  to  illustrate  a  single  principle.  It  replaces 
contrast  and  suspense  with  intensive  thoroughness  and 
the  strict  logic  of  causal  succession.  It  is  the  short 
story  under  a  microscope,  the  short  story  on  a  vastty 
enlarged  scale.  Henry  James,  an  avowed  disciple  of 
Turgenev,  was  the  first  to  practise  this  form  in  Eng- 
lish; Mrs.  Wharton,  his  disciple,  has  continued  it; 
Conrad,  whose  literary  kinships  are  of  the  Continent, 
has  given  it  enlargement  and  several  new  character- 
istics; and  our  bookshelves  are  being  filled  with  new 
works  of  extraordinary  formal  merit,  and  in  length 
from  40,000  to  200,000  words,  which  prove  on  analysis 
to  be,  not  novels  of  the  older  dramatic  figuration,  but 
short  stories  or  novelle  of  the  most  rigid  specializa- 
tion in  a  single  phase  of  life  or  character.  The  ma- 
terial of  a  novel  may  be  present ;  but  the  purpose  is 


DESIGN  255 


to  exhaust  the  meaning  of  a  single  issue,  not  to  range 
freely  over  the  whole  complexity  of  life. 

Mr.  Howells,  whose  mind  has  always  turned  with 
interest  toward  the  arts  as  they  are  practised  in 
Europe,  despite  the  strong  and  sane  provincialism  of 
his  own  creative  work,  recognized  these  tendencies 
more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago,  and  was  pretty 
directly  writing  of  them  when  he  said : 

"...  each  man  is  a  microcosm,  and  the  writer 
who  is  able  to  acquaint  us  intimately  with  half  a 
dozen  people,  or  the  conditions  of  a  neighbourhood 
or  a  class,  has  done  something  which  cannot  in  any 
bad  sense  be  called  narrow ;  his  breadth  is  vertical  in- 
stead of  lateral,  that  is  all;  and  this  depth  is  more 
desirable  than  horizontal  expansion  in  a  civilization 
like  ours,  where  the  differences  are  not  of  classes,  but 
of  types,  and  not  of  types  either  so  much  as  of  char- 
acters. A  new  method  was  necessary  in  dealing  with 
the  new  conditions,  and  the  new  method  is  world- 
wide, because  the  whole  world  is  more  or  less  Ameri- 
canized. Tolstoi  is  exceptionally  voluminous  among 
modern  writers,  even  Russian  writers;  and  it  might 
be  said  that  the  forte  of  Tolstoi  himself  is  not  in  his 
breadth  sidewise,  but  in  his  breadth  upward  and 
downward.  The  Death  of  Ivan  Illitch  leaves  as  vast 
an  impression  on  the  reader's  soul  as  any  episode  of 
War  and  Peace,  which,  indeed,  can  be  recalled  only 
in  episodes,  and  not  as  a  whole.  I  think  that  our 
writers  may  be  safely  counselled  to  continue  their 
work  in  the  modern  way,  because  it  is  the  best  way 
yet  known.     If  they  make  it  true,  it  will  be  large,  no 


256  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

matter  what  its  superficies  are;  and  it  would  be  the 
greatest  mistake  to  try  to  make  it  big.  A  big  book 
is  necessarily  a  group  of  episodes  more  or  less  loosely 
connected  by  a  thread  of  narrative,  and  there  seems 
no  reason  why  this  thread  must  always  be  supplied. 
Each  episode  may  be  quite  distinct,  or  it  may  be  one 
of  a  connected  group ;  the  final  effect  will  be  from  the 
truth  of  each  episode,  not  from  the  size  of  the 
group."  1 

The  effect  of  this  kind  of  intensive  specialization 
is  a  singular  and  most  amazing  rebirth  in  imaginative 
literature  of  something  very  like  the  classical  unities 
of  time,  place,  and  action.  The  unities  as  they  were 
observed  in  classic  drama  and  in  neo-classic  imitations 
justified  themselves  in  aesthetics  and  were  employed 
primarily  for  aesthetic  reasons;  they  served  the  work 
which  obeyed  them,  not  as  agents  of  a  closer  contact 
with  the  real  life  of  men  and  women,  but  as  agents 
of  an  inward  and  self-sufficient  harmony  in  the  work 
itself.  Marlowe  and  Shakspere,  when  they  cast  aside 
the  unities  in  order  to  get  nearer  to  life,  were  freeing 
art  from  the  shackles  of  convention.  But  the  modern 
artist  has  got  round  to  the  beginning  of  the  cycle; 
we  see  in  him  the  unities  recovered  and  reconstituted, 
though  for  different  reasons  and  in  a  new  spirit.  He 
tells  one  story  and  one  only  because  he  wants  to  get 
to  the  bottom  of  something,  not  because  of  any 
fancied  ideal  of  artistic  symmetry;  he  takes  a  short 
and  continuous  stretch  of  time  because  he  wants  to 

i  Criticism  and  Fiction,  142-43.  New  York:  Harper  &  Bros. 
MDCCCXCIII. 


DESIGN  257 


preserve  unbroken  the  chain  of  causality  in  his  ac- 
tion, not  because  he  thinks  the  flight  of  time  in  the 
work  of  art  should  match  the  flight  of  time  in  real 
events;  he  keeps  his  scene  narrowed  and  single  be- 
cause he  wants  to  correlate  man  causally  with  his 
environment,  not  because  he  considers  a  change  of 
scene  inherently  inartistic.  The  reasons  are  different ; 
but  the  result,  in  concentration,  in  focus,  is  strikingly 
the  same.  This  change  in  the  shape  of  the  novel,  a 
change  brought  about  by  new  ideas  and  a  new  pur- 
pose, constitutes  the  superiority  of  the  modern  novel 
as  a  form  over  any  other  large  unit  of  imaginative 
expression  whatever;  and  it  is  one  of  the  principal 
reasons  for  hoping  that  genius  of  the  future  will  find 
more  to  facilitate,  and  less  to  impede,  its  utterance 
than  it  has  ever  found. 


Have  I  seemed  thus  far  to  be  slighting  the  purpose 
and  meaning  of  fiction  in  favour  of  its  subordinate 
means  and  methods?  To  do  so  has  been  far  from 
my  intention :  I  have  wanted  to  speak  of  these  lesser 
things  just  in  so  far  as  they  are  governed  by  the 
greater,  and  to  treat  the  form  of  the  novel  only  as  it 
is  ruled  by  the  spirit.  If  I  have  not  succeeded 
before  this  point  in  showing  that  our  modern  way 
of  writing  novels  is  a  natural  outcome  of  our 
modern  way  of  looking  at  life,  I  shall  have  done  so 
when  I  have  noted  once  more  that  the  service  of  de- 


258  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


sign  or  technique  is  to  help  fiction  represent  life — 
not  to  copy  it,  or  idealize  it,  or  prove  something  about 
it,  or  make  a  substitute  for  it,  but  to  represent  it. 
Just  as  the  details  of  an  artist's  subject  are  chosen  to 
represent  the  whole  subject,  to  stand  for  more  than 
they  are,  so  the  whole  subject  is  chosen  to  represent 
as  much  as  may  be  of  life.  Other  things  equal,  the 
worth  of  a  piece  of  fiction  is  proportioned  to  its  wide- 
ness  or  wealth  of  reference.  The  more  it  stands  for, 
the  more  it  is,  even  though  it  be  slight  in  itself.  And 
shall  we  not  say  that  the  purpose  of  modern  technique, 
which  has  on  the  whole  the  effect  of  curtailing  the 
subject-matter  of  the  individual  story,  is  to  extend  and 
amplify  the  meaning  of  the  story,  and,  through  thor- 
oughness of  treatment,  to  make  the  artist's  little  stand 
for  more  than  ever?  That  economy  of  means  and 
material  should  have  led  to  enlargement  of  the  repre- 
sentational power  of  the  novel  seems  to  me  to  be  the 
most  significant  of  recent  general  results  in  fiction. 
It  is  worth  while,  I  think,  to  make  room  here  for 
three  examples  of  that  result.  Let  the  first  be  Mr. 
Hardy's  Return  of  the  Native,  one  of  the  most  power- 
ful novels  of  localized  "atmosphere"  in  any  language. 
The  motif  is  set  in  an  opening  chapter,  "A  Face  on 
which  Time  makes  but  Little  Impression,"  a  descrip- 
tion of  Egdon  Heath,  the  barren  waste  in  which  the 
action  takes  place.  This  motif  dominates  the  whole 
tale.  As  on  the  heath,  so  in  the  souls  of  the  char- 
acters, and  especially  in  the  soul  of  the  heroine, 
Eustacia  Vye  Yeobright,  night  and  day  wrestle  to- 
gether in  a  sort  of  interminable  twilight.     The  in- 


DESIGN  259 


scrutable  face  of  nature  throughout  the  book  is  ilsed 
to  symbolize  Mr.  Hardy 's  view  of  the  inscrutable  way 
of  the  cosmos  with  the  whole  human  species;  man's 
daily  life  in  a  natural  scene  which  is  and  must  remain 
a  riddle  to  him  is  subtly  suggestive  of  our  common  life 
in  an  immensity  which  we  can  neither  understand  nor 
change;  and  the  changelessness  of  that  indifferent  and 
mocking  face  of  nature,  which  neither  smiles  nor 
frowns  while  men  and  women  play  for  a  moment 
their  puny  parts  under  its  fixed  gaze  before  they  are 
swallowed  into  it,  is  an  image  of  the  eternal  futility 
which  Hardy  saw  as  perhaps  the  one  unifying  reality 
of  our  common  life.  This  is  not  symbolism,  and  it  is 
not  allegory :  it  is  suggestion  used  to  the  end  of  repre- 
sentation on  the  grandest  scale.  It  weaves  a  phil- 
osophy of  the  whole  into  the  patterned  history  of  a 
handful  of  lives. 

My  other  two  examples,  both  pre-eminent  novels  of 
the  first  decade  of  this  century,  bring  us  to  the 
threshold  of  the  present.  As  unlike  as  possible  from 
each  other  in  substance  and  in  minor  points  of  tech- 
nique, they  are  alike  in  that  the  masses  of  subject- 
matter  of  each  are  invoked  by  a  single  principle  and 
dedicated  to  its  illustration.  In  each  instance,  the 
principle  is  a  large  truth  about  life.  Mr.  Arnold  Ben- 
nett's Old  Wives'  Tale  has  on  the  surface  as  defiant 
a  breach  of  unity  as  a  novel  could  well  contain ;  for 
there  are  two  heroines  of  widely  different  and  widely 
sundered  lives,  in  large  part  separately  observed  and 
recorded.  But  there  is  a  unity  which  comes  out  of 
this  disjunction,  and  it  is  this;  the  life  of  Constance 


260  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

and  the  life  of  Sophia,  separate  and  unlike  as  they 
are,  arrive  ultimately  at  an  equal  and  a  similar  un- 
derstanding of  what  life  is.  Life  is  something  that 
we  never  understand  until  we  have  lived  it ;  and  when 
we  have  lived  it  we  see  that  it  is  something  which  we 
could  never  have  lived  at  all  if  we  had  understood 
it  first.  That,  says  Mr.  Bennett,  is  our  common  lot 
and  the  ultimate  wisdom ;  and  it  is  a  triumphant  illus- 
tration of  the  modern  kind  of  unity  in  purpose  and 
effect  that  he  should  have  brought  so  large  a  sense  of 
community  out  of  material  inherently  so  scattered,  so 
little  subjected  to  the  other  and  lesser  modern  prac- 
tices of  economy. 

Mr.  Conrad's  Nostromo  is  likewise  a  vindication  of 
unity  through  principle  and  purpose,  in  defiance  of 
technical  regulations  which  are  useful  in  their  place. 
Here  is  a  story  of  which,  materially  speaking,  the  very 
mainspring  is  romance — a  story  of  a  misgoverned 
tropical  republic  of  the  New  World,  with  a  silver- 
mine  and  a  horde  of  pirates,  with  revolution  and  coun- 
ter-revolution and  any  number  of  violent  deeds  and 
thrilling  rescues,  as  its  principal  machinery.  It  is  the 
representational  use  of  all  this  that  turns  it  into 
realism.  For  the  country  of  the  tale,  Costaguana, 
is  the  modern  world  in  symbolic  miniature;  and  the 
triumph  of  the  mine  of  silver  over  a  group  of  in- 
dividuals, some  of  whom  loathe  it  and  some  covet,  some 
of  whom  it  drives  to  perjury,  to  treason,  to  murder, 
others  of  whom  it  despoils  through  its  tragic  effects 
on  those  whom  they  love — this  triumph  of  the  precious 
metal  is  the  ascendancy  of  material  interests  in  mod- 


DESIGN  261 


ern  life,  the  tyranny  of  the  economic,  the  corrosion 
of  greed,  the  downfall  of  the  idealist  through  his  per- 
sonal dependence  on  those  whom  material  interests 
can  corrupt  or  destroy.  Nostromo  is  a  pageant  and 
an  epic  of  a  civilization  founded  on  commerce ;  and 
if  half  its  greatness  is  in  its  mastery  of  the  immediate 
facts,  at  least  we  may  say  that  the  other  half  is  in  the 
sweep  and  clarity  of  its  synthetic  representation  of  a 
good  share  of  modern  existence  in  a  world  whose  most 
cherished  precept  is  to  buy  in  the  cheapest  and  sell 
in  the  dearest  market. 


ENTERTAINMENT 


>> 


Throughout  this  series  of  discussions  of  the  pur- 
pose and  the  meaning  of  fiction  I  have  had  a  great  deal 
to  say  about  such  things  as  the  author's  attitude  toward 
his  work,  the  status  of  fiction  in  this  generation  and 
that,  and  the  general  evolution  of  the  novel  upward; 
but  I  have  taken  hardly  any  notice  of  the  correspond- 
ing changes  which  must  have  occurred  in  the  reader 
of  fiction,  if  the  novel  has  achieved  anything  of  its 
real  purpose.  I  have  dealt  with  the  more  and  more 
truth,  the  higher  and  higher  kind  of  truth,  which  the 
novelist  is  always  putting  into  his  writing:  now  let 
me  deal  with  the  amount  and  kind  of  truth  which  the 
reader  must,  in  justice,  get  out  of  his  reading. 

We  have  seen,  if  my  account  has  attained  any 
coherence,  that  the  evolution  of  the  novel  has  been  an 
affair  of  struggle  between  opposed  forces,  and  that 
the  struggle  has  constantly  been  shifted  to  a  higher 
and  higher  plane,  every  bit  of  ground  won  represent- 
ing a  new  ideal  for  the  shape  or  the  spirit  of  the 
novel,  or  for  both.  First  came  the  struggle  between 
the  method  of  extravagant  fancy  and  the  method  of 
realism  of  circumstance;  and  the  novel  won  truth  to 
fact.  Then  came  the  struggle  between  satire  and  the 
scientific  attitude;  and  the  novel  achieved  its  present 
realism  of  spirit,  its  truth  to  the  nature  of  things. 
The  whole  trend  throughout  these  stages  is  from  ir- 

265 


266  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


responsibility  toward  responsibility,  or,  as  I  said,  from 
a  lower  and  more  personal  conception  of  truth  to  a 
higher  and  more  impersonal. 

Now,  it  is  my  present  point  that  this  brief  history 
of  what  has  happened  to  the  novel  is  also  a  brief 
implied  history  of  what  must  have  happened  to  the 
reader.  If  we  leave  out  the  baser  demands  of  the 
commercial  market,  which  always  remain  about  the 
same  except  for  superficial  vogues,  and  which  almost 
automatically  create  the  supplies  they  desire,  it  re- 
mains pretty  true — at  least  truer  than  in  almost  any 
other  kind  of  transaction— that  the  supply  of  fiction 
creates  the  demand.  The  novelist  not  only  serves  his 
public:  to  a  large  extent  he  makes  it,  and  makes  it 
after  his  own  kind.  And  it  seems  on  the  whole  a  true 
generalization  that  the  less  responsible  fiction  of  the 
time,  roughly,  before  1860  sought  and  found  a  less 
responsible  reader,  the  more  responsible  fiction  since 
that  time  a  more  responsible  reader.  We  know  that 
only  within  forty  years  or  thereabout  has  the  reading 
of  fiction  become  completely  respectable;  and  that 
means  that  the  aim  of  the  novel  has  become  elevated, 
which  means  in  turn  that  it  finds  its  mark  in  a  better 
and  better  part  of  the  reading  population.  The  sort 
of  person  who  read  history,  biography,  and  memoirs 
a  half  century  ago,  and  by  no  means  novels,  reads 
novels  now  as  a  quite  natural  recourse.  I  am  not  at 
this  moment  debating  whether  the  change  is  good  for 
him  :  but  it  is  certainly  a  good  thing  for  the  novel,  and 
indicative  of  its  gradual  self-improvement,  that  the 
reader  who  had  nothing  to  do  with  it  in  the  last 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  267 

generation  could  hardly  do  without  it  in  this.  The 
change  means,  to  put  it  shortly,  that  once  upon  a 
time  the  truth-loving  person  read  fiction,  if  at  all, 
without  reference  to  his  love  of  truth,  in  order  to 
forget,  to  take  "a  moral  holiday,"  to  be  "taken  out 
of  himself";  whereas  now  he  can  read  fiction  precisely 
to  intensify  and  reward  his  love  of  truth,  however 
exacting  that  may  be.  Fiction  once  offered,  princi- 
pally, amusement  or  diversion  through  escape  from 
responsibility;  now  it  offers,  at  least  the  best  of  it 
does,  the  pleasure  of  responsibility  understood,  ac- 
cepted, and  welcomed. 

Naturally  I  do  not  mean  that  the  great  novelists  of 
the  past  failed  on  the  whole  to  tell  truth,  or  that  their 
readers  failed  to  find  truth  in  them.  A  great  artist 
is,  almost  by  definition,  a  person  who  sees  that  on  the 
whole  truth  is  more  entertaining  than  falsification. 
But  they  worked,  those  great  novelists,  quite  frankly 
under  the  ideal  of  entertainment,  as  we  see  by  the 
places  where  their  work  does  not  ring  true.  Those 
are  invariably  the  places  where  they  thought  they 
saw  a  clash  between  truth  to  human  nature  and  di- 
version for  the  reader.  Where  they  thought  a  pretty 
lie  would  please  the  reader  better  than  the  restraint 
of  sober  verity,  there  is  no  conflict  at  all — they  tell 
the  pretty  lie.  Whereas  now  they  would  tell  the 
sober  verity;  and  the  reader — this  is  the  important 
point  of  difference — would  accept  it  as  conveying  more 
and  better  pleasure  than  the  pretty  lie.  The  modern 
reader  who  is  worth  writing  for  does  not  readily 
pardon  his  realist  for  turning  sentimentalist. 


268  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


This  change  in  the  novel-writer,  and  in  the  reader's 
requirement,  was  expressed  inimitably  by  Mr.  Howells 
a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  in  some  passages  about  the 
tradition  of  the  holiday  story  as  written  by  Dickens 
and  others.  There  is  no  doubting  the  genuineness  of 
Dickens's  literary  conscience,  judging  it  by  the  high- 
est standards  extant  in  his  time:  yet  any  common 
reader  of  1918  can  see  the  tinsel  in  what  Dickens's 
public  took  for  gold.  Says  Mr.  Howells,  after  noting 
that  it  was  Dickens  who  "rescued  Christmas  from 
Puritan  distrust,  and  humanized  it  and  consecrated 
it  to  the  hearts  and  homes  of  all": 

"Very  rough  magic,  as  it  now  seems,  he  used  in 
working  his  miracle,  but  there  is  no  doubt  about  his 
working  it.  One  opens  his  Christmas  stories  in  this 
later  day — The  Carol,  The  Chimes,  The  Haunted 
Man,  The  Cricket  on  the  Hearth,  and  all  the  rest — 
and  with  'a  heart  high-sorrowful  and  cloyed,'  asks 
himself  for  the  preternatural  virtue  that  they  once 
had.  The  pathos  appears  false  and  strained;  the 
humour  largely  horse-play;  the  character  theatrical; 
the  joviality  pumped ;  the  psychology  commonplace ; 
the  sociology  alone  funny.  It  is  a  world  of  real 
clothes,  earth,  air,  water,  and  the  rest ;  the  people 
often  speak  the  language  of  life,  but  their  motives 
are  as  disproportioned  and  improbable,  and  their  pas- 
sions and  purposes  as  overcharged,  as  those  of  the 
worst  of  Balzac's  people."  And  again,  in  droll  and 
specific  irony  on  some  particular  ingredients  of  the 
Christmas  tradition  in  stories: — 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  269 

"...  the  Christmas  season  is  meteorologically  .  .  . 
favourable  to  the  effective  return  of  persons  long 
supposed  lost  at  sea,  or  from  a  prodigal  life,  or  from 
a  darkened  mind.  The  longer,  denser,  and  colder 
nights  are  better  adapted  to  the  apparition  of  ghosts, 
and  to  all  manner  of  signs  and  portents;  while  they 
seem  to  present  a  wider  field  for  the  active  interven- 
tion of  angels  in  behalf  of  orphans  and  outcasts. 
The  dreams  of  elderly  sleepers  at  this  time  are  apt 
to  be  such  as  will  effect  a  lasting  change  in  them 
when  they  awake,  turning  them  from  the  hard,  cruel, 
and  grasping  habits  of  a  life-time,  and  reconciling 
them  to  their  sons,  daughters,  and  nephews,  who  have 
thwarted  them  in  marriage ;  or  softening  them  to  their 
meek,  uncomplaining  wives,  whose  hearts  they  have 
trampled  upon  in  their  reckless  pursuit  of  wealth ; 
and  generally  disposing  them  to  a  distribution  of 
hampers  among  the  sick  and  poor,  and  to  a  friendly 
reception  of  chubby  gentlemen  with  charity  subscrip- 
tion papers.  Ships  readily  drive  upon  rocks  in  the 
early  twilight,  and  offer  exciting  difficulties  of  sal- 
vage; and  the  heavy  snows  gather  thickly  round  the 
steps  of  wanderers  who  lie  down  to  die  in  them  pre- 
paratory to  their  discovery  and  rescue  by  immediate 
relatives.  The  midnight  weather  is  also  very  suit- 
able to  encounter  with  murderers  and  burglars;  and 
the  contrast  of  its  freezing  gloom  with  the  light  and 
cheer  indoors  promotes  the  gaieties  which  merge,  at 
all  well  regulated  country-houses,  in  love  and  mar- 
riage.    In  the  region  of  pure  character  no  moment 


270  THE     MODERN     NOVEL 

could  be  so  available  for  flinging  off  the  mask  of 
frivolity,  or  imbecility,  or  savagery,  which  one  has 
worn  for  ten  or  twenty  long  years,  say,  for  the  purpose 
of  foiling  some  villain,  and  surprising  the  reader,  and 
helping  the  author  out  with  his  plot.  Persons  abroad 
in  the  Alps,  or  Apennines,  or  Pyrenees,  or  anywhere 
seeking  shelter  in  the  huts  of  shepherds  or  the  dens 
of  smugglers,  find  no  time  like  it  for  lying  in  a  feigned 
slumber,  and  listening  to  the  whispered  machinations 
of  their  suspicious-looking  entertainers,  and  then  sud- 
denly starting  up  and  fighting  their  way  out ;  or  else 
springing  from  the  real  sleep  into  which  they  have 
sunk  exhausted,  and  finding  it  broad  day  and  the 
good  peasants  whom  they  had  so  unjustly  doubted, 
waiting  breakfast  for  them.  We  need  not  point  out 
the  superior  advantages  of  the  Christmas  season  for 
anything  one  has  a  mind  to  do  with  the  French  Revolu- 
tion, or  the  Arctic  explorations,  or  the  Indian  Mutiny, 
or  the  horrors  of  Siberian  exile ;  there  is  no  time  so 
good  for  the  use  of  this  material ;  and  ghosts  on 
shipboard  are  notoriously  fond  of  Christmas  Eve.  In 
our  own  logging  camps  the  man  who  has  gone  into  the 
woods  for  the  winter,  after  quarrelling  with  his  wife, 
then  hears  her  sad  appealing  voice,  and  is  moved  to 
good  resolutions  as  at  no  other  period  of  the  year; 
and  in  the  mining  regions,  first  in  California  and 
later  in  Colorado,  the  hardened  reprobate,  dying  in 
his  boots,  smells  his  mother's  doughnuts,  and  breathes 
his  last  in  a  soliloquized  vision  of  the  old  home,  and 
the  little  brother,  or  sister,  or  the  old  father  coming 
to  meet  him  from  heaven ;  while  his  rude  companions 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  271 

listen  round  him,  and  dry  their  eyes  on  the  butts  of 
their  revolvers. ' ' 1 

This  material  and  this  spirit  hardly  please  the  least 
critical  of  us  now.  Do  not  such  facts  prove  that  the 
conscience  of  art  has  changed  for  the  better,  and  with 
it  the  conscience  of  the  reader,  and  that  both  have 
become  more  like  the  conscience  of  ordinary  self- 
respecting  intercourse  ? 


II 


"Intercourse"  is,  I  think,  a  happy  word  for  the 
newer  relation  between  the  writer  of  stories  and  his 
public — especially  if  one  recall  the  high  sense  given 
that  word  by  Stevenson  in  his  essay  on  "Truth  of 
Intercourse."  We  conceive  the  artist  as  a  fellow- 
citizen  with  the  gift  of  profitable  utterance,  instead  of 
as  a  hired  public  performer  for  hours  of  relaxation. 
We  elevate  him,  in  short,  to  the  rank  of  a  fellow- 
worker. 

It  is  perhaps  worth  while  to  note  that  this  new  atti- 
tude, which  gives  the  artist  a  more  natural  place 
among  us  and  stresses  his  likeness  to  ourselves  instead 
of  his  differences,  is  a  return  part  way  to  what  must 
have  been  the  original  idea  of  his  function.  The 
primitive  artist  was  a  spokesman  of  many,  their 
voice  and  expression ;  his  task  it  was  to  interpret  them 
to  themselves,  as  they  drew  together  for  battle  or 
celebration,  mourning  or  festival.     He  was  the  com- 

1  Criticism  and  Fiction,  pp.  175-76;  163-66.  New  York: 
Harper  &  Broa.     MDCCCXCIII. 


272  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 


posite  consciousness  of  the  people  given  an  articulate 
voice.     When  national  or  racial  unity  declined,  his 
function  became  non-integral;  and  his  continued  ex- 
istence became  dependent  on  the  favour  of  some  in- 
dividual patron  who  supported  him.     In  the  second 
stage  the  artist  was  owned  by  an  individual,  as  a 
sort  of  rare  exhibit  whose  existence  conferred  distinc- 
tion on  the  owner.     About  the  time  of  Dr.  Samuel 
Johnson's  famous  declaration  of  independence,  this 
long  stage  of  patronage  and  fulsome  dedications  gave 
way  to  a  third,  much  more  difficult  to  describe,  much 
more  tenable  for  a  self-respecting  workman,  but  still 
of  limited  and  imperfect  dignity.     In  this  third  stage 
the  relation  of  patronage  continued,  only  the  whole 
book-buying  public  took  the  place  of  the  individual 
benefactor.     This  conjoint  ownership  of  a  writer  by 
a  whole  people — one  sees  it  in  the  mid-Victorian  Eng- 
lish attitude  toward  Dickens — involves  the  idea  that 
the  artist  is  a  queer  being  with  an  incomprehensible 
knack   of   giving   people   something   they   want;    an 
amazing  prodigy  of  nature  whom  the  public  takes 
pride  in  owning  and  exhibiting,  but  whom  it  does 
not  feel  in  the  least  obliged  to  understand  provided  it 
pays  him,  and  whom  it  would  not  greatly  care  to 
resemble.     The  artist  of  this  period  is  like  a  freak  in 
a  circus,  whom  people  pay  to  stare  at,  or  like  an  ex- 
pensive entertainer  who   can  be  "had   in"   for  the 
evening,  but  whom  no  one  would  dream  of  having  as 
a  guest. 

To  a  certain  extent  it  is  true  that  we  are  still  in 
this  third  stage ;  one  sees  a  relic  of  it  in  the  popular 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  273 

feeling  that  an  author  must  continue  to  emulate  his 
first  successes.  We  felt  abused  and  taken  advantage 
of  when  the  late  "William  De  Morgan,  who  had  pleased 
us  with  four  striking  novels  in  what  we  chose  to  call 
"his  own  vein,"  suddenly  betrayed  us  into  buying 
his  fifth  novel,  An  Affair  of  Dishonor,  written  in  an 
entirely  different  vein ;  we  begrudged  him  his  techni- 
cal and  legal  right  to  be  something  more  or  something 
less  than  himself,  to  be  the  part  of  himself  that  we 
were  not  paying  for. 

But,  despite  this  instinctive  tyranny  of  the  public 
toward  authors  who  have  identified  themselves  with 
a  particular  sort  of  fiction, — or,  as  we  put  it  in  our 
crude  commercial  vernacular,  a  particular  "line  of 
goods," — one  sees  some  hopeful  signs  of  a  fourth 
stage,  more  like  the  first,  in  which  the  artist  shall  be  a 
self-respecting  fellow-worker  with  the  rest  of  us, 
judged  by  the  much  or  little  value  of  his  intercourse 
with  us,  and  willing,  since  it  is  necessary,  to  take  the 
pay  that  comes  from  the  social  value  of  his  work. 
This  view  of  the  artist,  the  only  one  which  brings  truth 
of  intercourse  to  the  front,  is  of  course  a  product  of 
our  socialized  view  of  everything.  It  is  bound  to  be 
given  an  enormous  impetus  in  a  time  like  this,  when 
unity  of  conscience  is  so  quickened  and  intensified 
among  great  masses  of  men;  for  at  such  times,  not 
only  does  the  artist  express  what  we  want,  interpret 
us  to  ourselves,  and  read  for  us  the  meaning  of  life 
and  struggle  and  death  better  than  the  politician  or 
the  inarticulate  soldier  can  do,  but  he  also  dies  for 
us  and  with  us.     The  young  poets  whose  names  this 


274  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

war  has  added  to  the  roll  made  illustrious  by  Sir 
Philip  Sidney  have  done  something  for  the  place  of 
the  artist  in  our  civilization;  and  Rupert  Brooke 
buried  in  foreign  soil  on  the  hilltop  of  his  ^Egean  isle 
is  perhaps  doing  as  much  for  the  reader  of  the  future 
as  Rupert  Brooke  writing: 

"If  I  should  die,  think  only  this  of  me : 
That  there's  some  corner  of  a  foreign  field 
That  is  for  ever  England." 

Hardly  ever  again,  after  the  artist  has  shown  himself 
as  real  in  his  living  and  dying  as  in  his  writing,  can 
we  go  back  to  the  patronizing  system  which  sets  him 
apart  as  a  matinee  idol — an  impersonator  and  not  a 
person. 

Ill 

All  this  change  of  attitude  is  the  flat  rejection  of 
art  as  diversion  merely,  of  art  for  escape.  What  we 
must  ban  and  debar  and  obliterate  is  the  wholly  false 
notion  that  life  and  literature  are  two  largely  separate 
things  that  have  least  to  do  with  each  other.  The 
man  who  writes  a  book-  is  living  most  fully  while  he 
does  it ;  it  is  a  wholly  false  classification  that  says  he 
is  dealing  in  life  at  second-hand,  while  the  man  who 
penetrates  the  Arctic  Circle  or  the  sources  of  the 
Amazon  is  dealing  in  it  at  first-hand.  A  story  is 
probably  not  worth  writing  unless  it  represents  the 
writer's  closest  contact  with  living  reality;  and  it  is 
certainly  not  worth  reading  if  it  merely  takes  the 
reader  divertingly  ''out  of  himself."    We  speak  of 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  275 

"the  world  of  books."  It  seems  to  me  an  uncon- 
sciously cynical  phrase,  a  tacit  sneer — as  though  read- 
ing a  book  were  an  interlude  in  living,  a  gap  in  reality, 
while  travelling  seventy  miles  an  hour  or  over-eating 
rich  foods  were  ' '  real "  !  A  worthy  book  was  writ- 
ten by  somebody  who  was  living  more  fully  when  he 
wrote  it  than  nine-tenths  of  us  ever  live;  and  if  we 
cannot  read  it  in  fulness  of  life,  if  we  read  it  because 
we  have  "nothing  to  do,"  then,  heaven  help  us,  we 
are  doddering  in  the  wrong  generation. 

What,  then,  is  meant  by  the  saying  that  "The  pur- 
pose of  all  art  is  to  give  pleasure?"  Why,  simply 
that  we  must  give  "pleasure"  a  large  enough  defini- 
tion. We  must  make  it  mean  the  pleasure  of  the 
right  person,  and  the  right  person  taken  at  the  right 
time.  Mr.  Brownell  speaks  1  of  the  readers  who  rest 
the  whole  justification  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe  on  his 
success  in  making  their  flesh  creep.  Doesn't  he  make 
one's  flesh  creep?  they  ask.  Well,  says  Mr.  Brownell, 
that  depends  entirely  on  whose  flesh  they  are  referring 
to.  There  are  all  sorts  of  pleasures;  and  the  sort  of 
person  who  reacts  decisively  to  the  best  is  ordinarily 
left  untouched  by  the  less  good.  Sociologically,  we 
are  all  agreed  that  the  highest  pleasures  are  not  those 
which  "take  us  out  of  ourselves,"  but  those  which  take 
us  more  deeply  into  ourselves  and  into  each  other ;  not 
those  which  make  us  forget,  but  those  which  quicken 
and  inspire  remembrance.  In  other  words,  the  high- 
est pleasures  are  the  social  emotions  which  come  from 

i  Essay  on  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  in  American  Prose  Masters. 
By  W.  C.  Brownell.  New  York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
1909. 


276  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

a  rational  and  truthful  view  of  our  status  as  fellow- 
mortals — pity,  compassion,  fellow-feeling,  fraternity, 
solidarity;  the  pleasures  of  "truth  of  intercourse." 
It  is  well  to  remind  ourselves  that  the  highest  develop- 
ment of  civilization  is  two  or  three  men  sitting  in  a 
room  talking. 

This  sense  of  community  on  which  the  great  joys 
depend  is  recognized  in  all  great  art,  and  especially  in 
the  moral  compensations  of  great  tragedy.  The  social 
emotions  of  which  I  am  speaking  may  often  be  merged 
with  pain :  every  one  of  them  demands  at  least  a  per- 
son with  the  capacity  for  generous  pain.  Most  of 
them  are  compound  of  pain  and  pleasure.  Pater 
speaks  of  "living  at  the  point  where  all  the  highest 
sensations  meet ' ' ;  the  fully  pleasured  life  is  what  it  is 
because  the  pleasure  is  full,  not  because  the  pleasure 
is  all  of  one  kind.  Any  sort  of  self-discipline  or  re- 
nunciation converts  a  lower  pleasure  into  a  higher. 
The  prototype  of  all  such  truisms  is  in  David's  words, 
' '  Can  I  drink  the  blood  of  my  friends  ? "  as  he  pours 
the  water  on  the  ground,  renouncing  a  sensual  pleas- 
ure for  a  spiritual ;  or  in  the  words  of  a  greater  than 
David,  "Except  a  corn  of  wheat  fall  into  the  ground 
and  die,  it  abideth  alone :  but  if  it  die,  it  bringeth  forth 
much  fruit." 

And— if  I  may  be  trivial  again  after  being  perhaps 
unduly  serious — it  is  quite  as  true  that  the  person 
who  renounces  the  reading  of  silly  books,  or  the  read- 
ing of  serious  books  in  a  silly  frame  of  mind,  is  re- 
nouncing a  low  pleasure  of  self -gratification  for  a 
higher  pleasure  of  self-development,  and  getting  rid  of 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  277 

a  chocolate-cream  philosophy  for  the  sake  of  a  sense 
of  what  life  is  really  made  of — which  is  the  thing  that 
real  books  are  made  of  too. 


IV 


Of  course  no  one  means  to  deny  fiction  a  reasonable 
self-indulgence  in  the  matter  of  moral  holidays.  The 
Pipe-Smoker  in  one  of  Mr.  Kenneth  Grahame  's  Pagan 
Papers  speaks  of  cigarettes  as  being  all  very  well 
"when  you're  not  smoking";  and  books  there  be  too, 
ranging  from  those  of  Thomas  Love  Peacock  to  those 
of  Mr.  W.  W.  Jacobs,  which  are  all  very  well  when 
you're  not  reading.  Every  member  of  every  one  of 
the  learned  professions,  and  all  writers  and  lecturers 
especially,  must  have  many  intervals  of  looking  for- 
ward with  intense  relish  to  the  blessed  relief  of  having 
for  a  time  no  opinions  to  express,  or  even  to  hold  ;  and 
it  is  a  notorious  fact  that  every  teacher  of  the  young 
spends  the  month  of  May  reviling  his  occupation  and 
threatening  to  buy  a  farm.  Was  it  Belfast  in  The 
Nigger  of  the  "Narcissus"  who,  in  the  revulsion  of 
feeling  produced  by  such  an  accumulation  of  hard- 
ships as  was  the  lot  of  seamen  in  ships  that  sailed, 
threatened  to  "chuck  going  to  sea  for  ever  and  go  in  a 
steamer"?  Anything,  done  hard  enough  and  long 
enough,  proves  the  advantage  of  doing  it  no  more  for 
a  season,  and  of  doing  anything  else  whatever;  but 
the  implicit  meaning  of  all  vacations  is  that  temporary 
irresponsibility  is  one  kind  of  preparation  for  being 


278  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

permanently  responsible.  It  is  work  that  gives  a 
vacation  all  the  meaning  it  can  ever  have.  And  the 
literature  of  pure  diversion,  likewise,  derives  its  sense 
from  its  relation  to  the  literature  of  interpretation. 
We  read  the  literature  of  escape — often  with  a  feeling 
that  the  function  of  the  mere  entertainer  is  in  some 
sort  a  sacred  one,  a  ministry— precisely  because  of 
everything  that  it  is  not;  thus  tacitly  admitting  that 
it  is  an  exception  and  not  the  norm. 

A  book  from  which  I  have  already  quoted,  Criticism 
and  Fiction,  puts  the  concession  to  irresponsibility 
into  terms  partly  historical  when  it  says:  "I  am  not 
saying  that  what  may  be  called  the  fantastic  romance 
— the  romance  that  descends  from  Frankenstein 
rather  than  The  Scarlet  Letter — ought  not  to  be.  On 
the  contrary,  I  should  grieve  to  lose  it,  as  I  should 
grieve  to  lose  the  pantomime  or  the  comic  opera,  or 
many  other  graceful  things  that  amuse  the  passing 
hour,  and  help  us  to  live  agreeably  in  a  world  where 
men  actually  sin,  suffer,  and  die. ' ' 1  Note,  though, 
how  Mr.  Howells  goes  on:  "But  it  belongs  to  the 
decorative  arts,  and  though  it  has  a  high  place  among 
them,  it  cannot  be  ranked  with  the  works  of  the 
imagination — the  works  that  represent  and  body  forth 
human  experience.  Its  ingenuity  can  always  afford 
a  refined  pleasure,  and  it  can  often,  at  some  risk  to 
itself,  convey  a  valuable  truth."1 

It  is  the  higher  of  these  two  implied  kinds  of  pleas- 
ure that  art  must  more  and  more  steadfastly  hold  for 

i  Criticism  and  Fiction,  p.   116.     By  W.  D.  Howells.     New 
York:   Harper  &  Bros.     MDCCCXCIII. 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  279 


its  ideal.  To  be  art  at  all,  it  must  of  course  minister 
to  pleasure;  but  there  always  remains  the  difference 
between  getting  out  of  life  to  seek  pleasure  and  seek- 
ing to  bring  pleasure  into  life.  One  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished surgeons  in  America,  and  at  eighty  years 
one  of  the  hardest- working  men,  objects  to  the  the- 
oretically ideal  day  of  eight  hours  to  work,  eight  to 
play,  and  eight  to  sleep,  on  the  ground  that  himself 
requires  at  least  sixteen  hours  to  play.  No  one  sup- 
poses that  work  of  any  kind  is  all  beer  and  skittles; 
at  least  no  one  does  who  has  worked ;  and  some  there 
are  who  make  a  sad  and  labourious  business  even  of  do- 
ing nothing  at  all.  But  work  must  be  done,  somehow, 
on  a  basis  of  indomitable  joy  in  it,  and  as  our  only 
possible  means  of  self-expression  in  terms  of  life. 
And  so  must  be  done  the  work  of  the  novelist. 

It  is  one  of  the  distressing  anomalies  of  the  writ- 
er's life,  and  in  fact  one  of  the  chief  drawbacks  to 
it,  that  the  work  which  he  does  with  joy  is  not  re- 
ceived by  the  public,  whatever  the  joy  it  gives  them, 
as  work.  The  sober  business  of  his  life  is  the  excep- 
tion, the  interlude,  in  theirs.  The  irony  and  the 
incongruity  of  this  clash  between  the  purpose  of 
fiction  and  its  meaning  are  expressed  by  a  gifted 
contemporary  writer  in  these  terms:  "The  automo- 
bile and  the  telephone,  the  accomplishments  of  Mr. 
Edison  and  Mr.  Burbank,  and  it  would  be  permis- 
sible to  add  of  Mr.  Rockefeller,  influence  nowadays, 
in  one  fashion  or  another,  every  moment  of  every 
living  American's  existence;  whereas  had  America 
produced,  instead,  a  second  Milton  or  a  Dante,  it 


280  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

would  at  most  have  caused  a  few  of  us  to  spend  a  few 
spare  evenings  rather  differently. ' ' x  Such  a  con- 
sideration is  felt  as  belittling;  even  a  writer  who  af- 
fects to  despise  the  public  which  gives  him  his  living 
must  feel  its  interference  with  a  kind  of  plain  human 
dignity  which  we  all  like  to  have.  It  is  a  much  more 
serious  consideration  than  that  raised  by  Stevenson 
in  his  famous  "Letter  to  a  Young  Gentleman  Propos- 
ing to  Embrace  the  Career  of  Art."  To  win  one's 
living  by  pleasure  given  to  others  is  indeed  a  difficult 
sentence  to  accept,  unless  one  have  illimitable  faith 
in  the  quality  and  the  effectual  value  of  the  pleasure. 
But  even  the  professional  athlete  is  better  off,  in  this 
one  respect,  than  the  professional  story-teller:  at 
least,  what  his  public  accepts  from  him  is  the  same 
thing  which  he  is  paid  to  offer,  and  such  dignity  as 
he  has  does  not  suffer  the  affront  of  seeing  his  work 
daily  misconstrued,  taken  for  something  else  alto- 
gether. 

The  general  acceptance  of  fiction  as  a  part  of  real 
life  is  a  high  and  remote  possibility,  not  an  impos- 
sibility; and  its  very  remoteness  is  a  reinforcement 
of  every  reason  why  the  novelist  must  hope  and  strive 
for  it.  There  can  certainly  be  no  hope  of  a  public 
better  than  the  artist  himself  conceives  and  works 
for;  and,  as  a  fact,  the  changes  already  produced  in 
the  reader  by  the  writer's  greater  and  greater  de- 
mands upon  him  are  noteworthy  enough  to  justify 
the  hope  that  in  this  fundamental  matter  also  the 

i  The  Certain  Hour.  By  James  Branch  Cabell.  New  York : 
Robert  M.  McBride  &  Co.     Auctorial  Induction,  p.  32. 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  281 

artist  can,  by  being  creative  enough,  make  whatever 
kind  of  reader  he  needs.  For  example:  Time  was 
when  work  did  not  enter  into  the  subject-matter  of 
fiction.  The  characters  lived  exclusively  to  make  the 
story;  and  if  they  were  not  leisured  folk,  then  they 
were  working  folk  taken  in  their  hours  of  leisure. 
But  for  a  generation  past,  the  novel,  except  as  written 
by  Henry  James,  has  dealt  with  busy  folk  in  their 
hours  of  busyness.  Its  characters,  instead  of  existing 
to  live  the  story  that  the  novelist  wants  to  tell,  re- 
quire him  to  write  the  story  about  them  because  they 
are  really  living.  This  one  change  in  the  make-up  of 
fiction  shows  how  our  conception  of  pleasure  has 
changed,  from  escape  to  voluntary  self-immersion  in 
the  affairs  of  our  fellows.  And  if  this  change  could 
come  about  in  our  attitude  toward  the  work  about 
which  the  novelist  writes,  why  can  it  not  come  about 
in  our  attitude  toward  the  work  which  he  himself 
does? 

All  art  looks  forward,  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously, to  the  breaking-down  of  the  distinctions  be- 
tween work  and  play  through  the  elevation  of  play 
to  the  worth  and  the  usefulness  of  labour.  While  we 
work  and  play  separately,  the  artist  is  bound  to  re- 
main a  person  of  inferior  dignity;  but  he  saves  his 
self-respect  by  working  tacitly  for  a  public,  hitherto 
almost  undreamed-of  save  by  a  few,  which  shall  live 
the  whole,  the  integral,  life — that  is,  which  shall  wholly 
and  exhaustively  live  all  the  time,  and  in  which  every- 
thing that  is  suffered  to  exist  at  all  shall  be  both  de- 
sirable and  indispensable,  both  play  and  work.     In 


282  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

that  life  of  the  future,  blessedly  free  from  the  shallow 
distinctions  between  the  things  we  do  because  we  have 
to  and  those  we  do  because  we  want  to,  the  arts  can 
really  come  into  their  inheritance.  Perhaps  this  is 
only  to  say  that  there  will  never  be  any  adequate  ap- 
preciation of  the  fine  art  of  telling  tales  until  a  great 
part  of  mankind  has  learned  to  make  a  fine  art  of 
living. 


There  is  one  corollary  of  taking  fiction  on  such 
terms,  as  an  incessant  ministration  to  living  reality, 
which  for  my  part  I  find  it  not  difficult  to  accept — 
the  deadness  at  this  moment  of  the  once  living  works 
which  we  reprint  and  study  and  call  ' '  classics. ' '  To 
begin  with,  most  of  them  were  produced  under  a 
pretty  shallow  definition  of  pleasure;  and  they  have 
therefore  nothing  to  say  to  our  higher  ideal  unless 
they  far  exceeded  the  utmost  implications  of  their 
lower  one.  Only  one  thing  could  save  fiction  inspired 
by  the  older  ideal:  enough  scope  of  vision  in  the 
artist  to  see  the  picture  of  our  common  human  nature 
as  it  is  for  ever,  whatever  becomes  of  its  momentary 
conditions.  Shakspere,  Fielding,  Jane  Austen — 
these,  and  very  few  others  in  English,  live  by  their 
creation  of  something  true  that  cannot  change. 

But  the  lesser  folk  who  had  not  this  vision — do  they 
transmit  to  us  any  real  message  ?  The  only  other  pos- 
sible achievement  is  the  timely  record  of  movements, 
tendencies,  beliefs,  phases  of  civilization — facts,  the 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  283 

material  of  the  lesser  and  lower  realism.  And  the 
appeal  of  these  is  necessarily  impermanent  just  in 
proportion  as  it  is  timely  and  intense.  The  least  in- 
spired realist,  if  he  have  conscience,  patience,  and 
clear  eye-sight,  can  show  us  in  one  book  more  about 
our  own  decade  than  all  the  Maria  Edgeworths  and 
Harriet  Martineaus  and  Charles  Kingsleys  in  litera- 
ture can  teach  us  about  it  in  all  their  books  put  to- 
gether; and  unless  he  have  something  of  eternity  in 
his  pages,  in  another  decade  his  work  will  be  as  dead 
as  most  of  theirs. 

And  why  should  we  not  be  glad  to  let  him  have  his 
hour  of  life  in  his  work?  Recognizing  or  not  rec- 
ognizing its  mortality,  we  can  afford  to  be  glad  of 
whatever  vitality  it  has  in  its  own  time,  and  consent 
to  let  posterity  read  for  itself  as  we  read  for  our- 
selves. By  the  same  logic,  why  should  we  let  an- 
tiquity read  for  us?  A  book  is  dead  when  it  fails  to 
speak  fruitfully  to  us,  either  of  things  which  are  ever- 
lasting, or  of  things  which  are  pressing  and  impera- 
tive parts  of  our  lives  now.  I  do  not  see  why  we 
should  reject  books  which  do  the  second  thing  merely 
on  the  ground  that  they  will  be  meaningless  to  the 
future :  that  fact  proves  only  the  livingness  of  life. 
Neither  do  I  see  why  we  should  go  out  of  our  ways 
to  know  and  to  preserve  books  merely  because  they 
meant  something  once.  Either  attitude  implies  a 
veneration  for  art  as  something  apart  from  life — a 
disjunction  the  passing  of  which  this  book  partly 
records  and  partly  predicts. 

Most  novels  treat,  in  one  way  or  another,  a  single 


284  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

constantly  recurring  situation:  that  of  individual 
wealth  or  power  in  its  relations  with  the  rest  of  man- 
kind. Underlying  this  theme,  and  every  theme,  is 
human  nature.  If  in  treating  the  theme  the  novelist 
can  reveal  true  human  nature  as  it  has  never  been  re- 
vealed before  in  a  similar  connection,  he  has  done  the 
greatest  and  the  only  permanent  thing.  If,  failing  to 
do  that,  he  reveals  an  important  phase  of  our  present 
commercial  civilization,  he  has  done  the  next  greatest. 
His  novel  is  pretty  certain  of  oblivion;  but  why 
should  we  pretend  that  it  does  not  say  more  to  us 
than  some  nineteenth-century  novel  that  makes  us 
laugh  or  cry,  or  sleep,  over  the  fortunes  of  heroes  and 
heroines  whose  concerns  are  none  of  ours,  except 
through  the  vainest  and  most  belittling  kind  of 
curiosity — the  instinct  of  gossip,  pure  and  simple? 

Nothing  could  have  a  more  sanifying  effect  on  art 
than  a  ruthless  sacrifice  of  whatever  is  superstitious 
in  our  veneration  for  the  writings  of  the  past. 
Meredith  points,  for  the  artist,  the  way  to  a  noble 
disregard  of  all  but  living  realities  when  he  disclaims 
every  thought,  every  desire,  of  immortality  except  on 
the  score  of  service  rendered :  "...  all  right  use  of 
life,  and  the  one  secret  of  life,  is  to  pave  ways  for 
the  firmer  footing  of  those  who  succeed  us ;  as  to  my 
works,  I  know  them  faulty,  think  them  of  worth  only 
when  they  point  and  aid  to  that  end."  Art  is  a  liv- 
ing thing  to  him  who  makes  it:  unless  it  be  so  to  the 
rest  of  us,  have  we  really  accepted  it  at  all?  And 
while  the  artist  of  the  present  is  content  to  die  as 
soon  as  his  handiwork  means  nothing  to  us,  is  it  not 


"ENTERTAINMENT"  285 

strange  that  we  should  occupy  ourselves  with  con- 
ferring a  fictitious  life  upon  dead  artists  of  the  past, 
and,  as  Professor  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  once  said,  pin 
bits  of  coloured  ribbon  on  each  other  for  having  the 
intelligence  to  understand  their  works  ? 

I  end,  because  I  can  do  no  better,  with  this  eloquent 
account x  of  the  relation  between  writer  and  reader,  by 
a  novelist  whose  work  was  beginning  just  as  Mere- 
dith's was  ending;  an  account  contained  in  an  early 
Preface  which,  however  often  quoted  of  late,  is  not 
likely  ever  to  become  more  familiar  than  it  deserves : 

"Sometimes,  stretched  at  ease  in  the  shade  of  a 
roadside  tree,  we  watch  the  motions  of  a  labourer  in 
a  distant  field,  and  after  a  time,  begin  to  wonder 
languidly  as  to  what  the  fellow  may  be  at.  We 
watch  the  movements  of  his  body,  the  waving  of  his 
arms,  we  see  him  bend  down,  stand  up,  hesitate,  begin 
again.  It  may  add  to  the  charm  of  an  idle  hour  to 
be  told  the  purpose  of  his  exertions.  If  we  know  he 
is  trying  to  lift  a  stone,  to  dig  a  ditch,  to  uproot  a 
stump,  we  look  with  a  more  real  interest  at  his 
efforts;  we  are  disposed  to  condone  the  jar  of  his 
agitation  upon  the  restfulness  of  the  landscape;  and 
even,  if  in  a  brotherly  frame  of  mind,  we  may  bring 
ourselves  to  forgive  his  failure.  We  understood  his 
object,  and,  after  all,  the  fellow  has  tried,  and  per- 
haps he  had  not  the  strength — and  perhaps  he  had 
not  the  knowledge.  We  forgive,  go  on  our  way — and 
forget. 

i  The  Nigger  of  the  "Narcissus."  By  Joseph  Conrad.  New 
York:   Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.     1914.     Preface,  pp.  xii-xiii, 


286  THE     MODERN    NOVEL 

"And  so  it  is  with  the  workman  of  art.  Art  is 
long  and  life  is  short,  and  success  is  very  far  off. 
And  thus,  doubtful  of  strength  to  travel  so  far,  we 
talk  a  little  about  the  aim — -the  aim  of  art,  which,  like 
life  itself,  is  inspiring,  difficult — obscured  by  mists. 
It  is  not  in  the  clear  logic  of  a  triumphant  conclusion ; 
it  is  not  in  the  unveiling  of  one  of  those  heartless 
secrets  which  are  called  the  Laws  of  Nature.  It  is 
not  less  great,  but  only  more  difficult. 

"To  arrest,  for  the  space  of  a  breath,  the  hands 
busy  about  the  work  of  the  earth,  and  compel  men 
entranced  by  the  sight  of  distant  goals  to  glance  for 
a  moment  at  the  surrounding  vision  of  form  and 
colour,  of  sunshine  and  shadows ;  to  make  them  pause 
for  a  look,  for  a  sigh,  for  a  smile — such  is  the  aim, 
difficult  and  evanescent,  and  reserved  only  for  a  very 
few  to  achieve.  But  sometimes,  by  the  deserving  and 
the  fortunate,  even  that  task  is  accomplished.  And 
when  it  is  accomplished — behold! — all  the  truth  of 
life  is  there :  a  moment  of  vision,  a  sigh,  a  smile — and 
the  return  to  an  eternal  rest. ' ' 


A  BRIEF  SELECTIVE  AND  SUGGESTIVE  BIBLIOG- 
RAPHY OF  THE  NOVEL  IN  ENGLISH  WITH 
HINTS  FOR  STUDY 


A  BRIEF  SELECTIVE  AND  SUGGESTIVE 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  WITH  HINTS  FOR 

STUDY 

It  would  be  almost  possible,  with  the  aid  of  a  great  li- 
brary, to  fill  the  space  of  this  reading-  and  reference-list 
with  a  bibliography  of  bibliographies.  The  purpose  of 
the  following  pages  is  to  represent,  not  cover,  the  subject ; 
but  material  is  supplied  in  excess  of  that  reached  by  the 
ordinary  student,  and  enough,  I  believe,  if  one  were  to  fol- 
low it  faithfully,  to  lead  one  to  everything  that  bears  im- 
portantly on  the  history  of  the  novel  in  English. 

To  save  space,  I  have  kept  pretty  consistently  within 
certain  limitations.  (1)  I  bear  in  mind  primarily  the 
student  and  the  general  reader,  avoiding  the  mention  of 
works  or  editions  simply  for  their  interest  to  bibliophile 
and  collector.  (2)  I  almost  entirely  ignore  first  editions, 
except  of  books  published  within  twenty-five  yeai*s;  but 
dates  of  original  publication  of  novels  are  supplied  in 
brackets  after  the  titles.  (3)  I  name,  usually,  one  good 
working  library  edition  of  an  author's  collected  writings; 
a  recent  American  edition,  readily  accessible  and  suitable  to 
be  either  owned  or  merely  used,  whenever  I  am  acquainted 
with  one.  (4)  I  name  one  comprehensive  critical  estimate 
of  each  more  important  author,  making  a  few  exceptions 
where  there  are  different  estimates  which  strikingly  supple- 
ment each  other,  or  which  have  independently  great  intrinsic 
interest.  (5)  I  pay  no  attention  to  the  short-story  save 
where  its  history  obviously  crosses  and  affects  that  of  the 
novel. 

289 


290  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

It  has  seemed  advisable  to  omit  the  prices  of  books  listed, 
because,  in  the  conditions  produced  by  the  war,  book  prices 
hardly  remain  constant  for  even  the  period  required  to  see 
a  book  through  the  press. 

For  convenience  and  coherence,  I  have  arranged  the  list 
in  groups  based  partly  on  chronology  and  partly  on  a 
sequence  other  than  the  chronological;  that  is,  I  have  tried 
to  suggest  the  development  of  certain  types  and  modes  of 
fiction,  while  preserving  roughly  the  order  of  modern  fic- 
tional history  in  general.  The  last  division,  XI.,  is  of  neces- 
sity a  somewhat  personal  and  therefore  arbitrary  selection ; 
but  it  in  no  way  interferes  with  the  use  of  Divisions  I.-X.,  as 
a  disinterested  and  catholic  representation  of  the  subject. 

Titles  marked  with  a  star  ( * )  are  listed  in  the  useful  and 
inexpensive  Everyman's  Library  (London :  J.  M.  Dent  & 
Sons,  Ltd.;  New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  General  Edi- 
tor, Ernest  Rhys).  The  introductions  to  volumes  of  this 
series  are  invariably  helpful  in  suggestions  for  reading,  as 
well  as  in  suggestions  for  critical  appreciation. 

I.  General  works  of  reference,  to  be  consulted  on  several 
periods  or  phases  of  the  history  of  fiction. 

The  Cambridge  History  of  English  Literature. 
Edited  by  A.  W.  Ward  and  A.  R.  Waller.  New 
York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  1907-17.  14 
vols. 

The  History  of  Fiction.  By  John  Colin  Dunlop. 
Wilson's  Edition.  Bohn  Library.  1896.  2 
vols. 

A  History  of  the  Novel  Previous  to  the  Seven- 
teenth Century.  By  F.  M.  Warren.  New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Company.     1895. 

English  Literature  and  Society  in  the  Eighteenth 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  291 

Century.  By  Leslie  Stephen.  New  York:  G.  P. 
Putnam's  Sons.     1904. 

The  English  Novel;  a  study  in  the  development 
of  personality.  By  Sidney  Lanier.  New- 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1900. 

A  Study  of  Prose  Fiction.  By  Bliss  Perry. 
Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin   Co.     1903. 

The  Development  of  the  English  Novel.  By  Wil- 
bur L.  Cross.  New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co. 
1899. 

Masters  of  the  English  Novel.  By  Richard  Bur- 
ton. New  York:  Henry  Holt  and  Company. 
1909. 

British  Novelists  and  Their  Styles.  By  David 
Masson.    Boston:  Willard  Small.     1889. 

The  English  Novel.  By  Walter  Raleigh.  New 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1911.  (Fifth 
edition . ) 

The  English  Novel.  By  George  Saintsbury. 
New  York :  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.     1913. 

Two  Centuries  of  the  English  Novel.  By  Harold 
Williams.     London :  Smith,  Elder.     1911. 

II.  On  the  assthetics  and  technique  of  fiction,  see 

The  Art  of  Fiction.  By  Sir  Walter  Besant.  Bos- 
ton:  Cupples,  Upham  &  Co.  This  volume  in- 
cludes Henry  James's  rejoinder,  of  the  same  title 
(also  in  Partial  Portraits).  See,  in  the  same 
connection,  Stevenson's  answer  to  Henry  James 
{A  Humble  Remonstrance,  in  Memories  and 
Portraits). 
Materials  and  Methods  of  Fiction.  By  Clayton 
Hamilton.  New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 
1908. 


292  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Criticism  and  Fiction.  By  William  Dean  Howella. 
New  York:  Harper  Bros.  &  Co.  1893.  (A  de- 
fense of  realism.  For  the  opposite  view,  con- 
taining a  criticism  of  Howells  and  his  school, 
see  Ambrose  Bierce's  essay  on  The  Short  Story, 
in  The  Opiwionator,  Vol.  10  of  the  Collected 
Works.  New  York:  Neale  Publishing  Co. 
1909-12.) 

Notes  on  Novelists.  By  Henry  James.  New 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1914. 

The  Novels  and  Tales  of  Henry  James.  New 
York  Edition.  New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons.     1907-9.     (The  author's  Prefaces.) 

Creative  Criticism.  By  J.  E.  Spingarn.  New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Company.  (Essays  on 
the  Unity  of  Genius  and  Taste.) 

Standards.  By  W.  C.  Brownell.  New  York: 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1916. 

III.  For  general  bibliographical  suggestions,  see  The  Cam- 
bridge History  of  English  Literature,  Cross's  Develop- 
ment of  the  English  Novel,  Perry's  Study  of  Prose 
Fiction,  Wilson's  Edition  of  Dunlop,  and  A  Descrip- 
tive Guide  to  the  Best  Fiction  in  English,  by  Ernest  A. 
Baker  (New  York:  The  Macmillan  Company.  1913. 
New  Edition,  enlarged  and  thoroughly  revised.  This 
is  the  most  useful  critical  and  descriptive  bibliography 
of  fiction  in  English  from  the  mediseval  romances  to 
1911).  There  is  an  exhaustive  bibliography  of  the 
novel  of  manners  from  1600  to  1740  in  The  Rise  of  the 
Novel  of  Manners,  by  Charlotte  Elizabeth  Morgan 
(New  York:  Columbia  University  Press.  1911). 
See  also  the  catalogues  of  fiction  published  by  the 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  293 

public  libraries  of  Chicago,  Boston,  Cincinnati,  and 
St.  Louis;  and  Books  That  Count;  a  dictionary  of 
Standard  Books  (Edited  by  W.  Forbes  Gray.  Lon- 
don :  Adam  and  Charles  Black.  1912.  Columns  241- 
92). 

IV.  Pre-Elizabethan    forms    of   prose   fiction :    the    Greek 
romances  and  the  romances  of  Chivalry. 

Greek  Romances.  Translated  by  Rowland  Smith. 
Bonn's  Library.  (Translations  from  Helio- 
dorus,  Tatius,  and  Longus.)  See  also  Warren 
and  Dunlop. 

The  Flourishing  of  Romance  and  the  Age  of  Al- 
legory. By  George  Saintsbury.  New  York: 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1897.  See  also  War- 
ren, Dunlop,  and  The  Cambridge  History. 

V.  The  Elizabethan  period:  the  novella  and  the  novel. 

The  Greek  Romances  in  Elizabethan  Prose  Fiction. 
By  Samuel  Lee  Wolff.  Lancaster,  Pennsylvania: 
Press  of  the  New  Era  Printing  Co.     1912. 

The  English  Novel  in  the  Time  of  Shakespeare. 
By  J.  J.  Jusserand.  London:  T.  Fisher  Un- 
win.     1894.     See  also  The  Cambridge  History. 

The  following  will  serve  to  represent  the  Elizabethan 
practice  of  fiction : 

The   Palace   of   Pleasure.     By  William    Painter. 

[1566-7].    London:  D.  Nutt.     1890. 
The    Countess    of   Pembroke's    Arcadia.     By    Sir 

Philip  Sidney.     [1590].     Vols.  1-2  of  Works, 

London,  1725,  3  vols.    Also,  New  York:  E.  P. 

Dutton  &  Co.,  1907.     (Edited  by  E.  A.  Baker, 


294  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

with  the  additions  of  Sir  William  Alexander 
and  Richard  Beling,  a  life,  and  an  introduction.) 

Euphues  [1579]  and  Euphues  and  His  England 
[1580].  By  John  Lyly.  Vols.  1  and  2  of 
Works,  Oxford :  The  Clarendon  Press,  1902.  3 
vols. 

Rosalynde:  Euphues  Golden  Legacie,  found  after 
his  death  in  his  cell  at  Silexedra.  By  Thomas 
Lodge.  [1590].  London:  Chatto  &  Windus. 
1900.     (Edited  by  W.  W.  Greg.) 

The  Unfortunate  Traveller;  or,  the  Life  of  Jack 
Wilton.  By  Thomas  Nash.  [1594].  London: 
Chiswick  Press.  1892.  Edited,  with  an  essay 
on  the  Life  and  Writings  of  Thomas  Nash,  by 
Edmund  Gosse. 

VI.  The  Seventeenth  Century;  rise  of  the  novel  of  man- 
ners; precursors  of  realism. 
Illustrations  of  the  "heroic"  romances: 

Parthenissa;  that  most  fam'd  romance.     By  Roger 
Boyle,  First  Earl  of  Orrery.     First  part,  in  6 
vols.,  1654;  complete  edition  in  3  vols.,  1655. 
Aretina;  or,  the  Serious  Romance.     By  Sir  George 

Mackenzie.    London:  1661. 
Pandion  and  Iphigenia;  or,  the  Story  of  the  Coy 
Lady  of  Thessalia.    By  John  Crowne.     London : 
1665. 

All  of  these  are  imitations  of  the  imported 
(French)  romances  of  La  Calprenede  and 
the  Scuderys.  For  an  excellent  brief  ac- 
count of  the  whole  school,  see  Raleigh's  Chap- 
ter IV.  Note  that  The  Female  Quixote;  or 
the  Adventures  of  Arabella    (by  Mrs.  Char- 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  295 

lotte  Lennox.  Originally  published  1752. 
London:  F.  C.  &  J.  Rivington,  1820),  a  be- 
lated satire  on  this  school,  shows  how  long  its 
influence  refused  to  yield  to  the  realistic  re- 
action. The  romances  themselves  are  out  of 
print  and  not  commonly  accessible. 
Allegorical  realism: 

*Pilgrim's   Progress.     By   John   Bunyan    [1678]. 

Oxford.     1879.     Clarendon  Press  Series. 
The  Life  and  Death  of  Mr.  Badman.     By  John 
Bunyan.      [1680].     London:      W.    Heinemann. 
1900. 

Essay  on  Bunyan  in  the  Sixth  Series  of 
Shelbume  Essays.  By  Paul  Elmer  More. 
New  York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  1904-10. 
6  vols.  For  the  historical  background  of  this 
tradition,  see  Saintsbury's  Flourishing  of 
Romance  and  the  Age  of  Allegory. 
Social  realism ;  novels  of  scandal,  etc. : 

Plays,  Histories,  and  Novels.  By  Mrs.  Aphra 
Behn.  [1698].  London.  1871.  6  vols.  Vol. 
5  contains  the  best  of  the  novels,  including 
Oroonoko;  or,  The  Royal  Slave  and  The  Fair 
Jilt. 
Incognita.  By  William  Congreve.  London. 
[1692].  Note  especially  Congreve's  anti-ro- 
manticistic  Preface.  Out  of  print  since  1713. 
For  an  account,  see  Raleigh's  Chapter  IV. 
Secret  Memoirs  and  Manners  of  Several  Persons 
of  Quality  of  Both  Sexes.  From  the  New  Ata- 
lantis,  an  Island  in  the  Mediterranean.  By 
Mrs.  Mary  de  la  Riviere  Manley.  London. 
1709.    2  vols.     Out  of  print. 


296  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Memoirs  of  a  Certain  Island  Adjacent  to  Utopia. 
By    Mrs.     Eliza    Haywood.     London.     [1725]. 
Note  that  Mrs.  Haywood  partly  relapsed  into 
the   romantic-lackadaisical   tradition   in   Idalia; 
or,  The  Unfortunate  Mistress   (London.     1725) 
and  Philidore  and  Placentia;  or,  L 'Amour  trop 
Delicat  (London.    1727).    All  of  these  are  out 
of  print. 
Note  the  development  of  the  "character"  in  the  hands  of 
Addison  and  Steele   (Roger  de  Coverley  series  of  the 
*  Spectator  Papers).     For   a   summary  of  the  seven- 
teenth-century writers  of  "characters,"  including  Over- 
bury  and  Samuel  Butler,  see  Raleigh,  pp.  113-14. 
Pseudo-realistic  satire,   voyage  imaginaire,  Utopian   ro- 
mance, etc. 

*Travels  into  several  remote  Nations  of  the  World, 
by  Lemuel  Gulliver.  By  Jonathan  Swift.  [1726]. 
(Gulliver's  Travels  and  Other  Works,  exactly  re- 
printed from  the  first  edition,  and  edited,  with 
some  account  of  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  and  his 
voyages  to  the  sun  and  moon,  by  H.  Morley. 
New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  1906.)  A  mod- 
ern edition  of  Swift  is  The  Prose  Works  of 
Jonathan  Swift.  London:  G.  Bell  &  Sons. 
1907-8.     Of  this  edition,  Gulliver  is  Vol.  8. 

For  estimates  of  Swift,  see  Swift,  by  Leslie 
Stephen  (New  York.  1882.  English  Men  of 
Letters)  and  Essays  about  Men,  Women,  and 
Books,  by  Augustine  Birrell  (New  York: 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons). 
The  Consolidator;  or,  Memoirs  of  Sundry  Trans- 
actions from  the  World  in  the  Moon.  By 
Daniel     Defoe.     [1705].     This     and     Gulliver 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  297 


show  the  eighteenth-century  status  of  a  form  the 
lineage  of  which  includes  Lueian,  The  Ultimate 
Things  Beyond  Thule  of  Antonius  Diogenes 
(see  Warren),  More's  Utopia  [1516],  and  the 
romances  of  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  and  of  Vol- 
taire. The  form  is  perpetuated,  with  modi- 
fications, in  Bulwer-Lytton's  The  Coming  Race 
[1871],  Samuel  Butler's  Erewhon  and  Ere- 
whon  Revisited  Twenty  Years  Later  (Post- 
humous. New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  1910. 
Prefaces  1901),  Edward  Bellamy's  Looking 
Backward,  2000-1887  (Boston:  Houghton  Mif- 
flin Co.,  1888),  and  several  of  the  earlier  me- 
chanistic romances  of  H.  G.  Wells,  as  The  War 
of  the  Worlds  ([1898].  New  York:  Harper 
Bros.),  When  the  Sleeper  Wakes  ([1899].  New 
York:  Harper  Bros.),  and  In  the  Days  of  the 
Comet  ([1906].  New  York:  The  Century 
Co.). 

Such  Oriental  romances  as  *Rasselas,  Prince 
of  Abyssinia  [1759]  and  The  History  of  the 
Caliph  Vathek:  an  Arabian  Tale  from  an  un- 
published MS.  [French  version,  1782]  are  also, 
in  part,  voyages  imaginaires  without  the  pri- 
marily satiric  purpose.  A  more  fanciful  work 
in  the  same  tradition  is  Paltock's  *Peter  Wil- 
kins.  (Rasselas,  Prince  of  Abyssinia.  By 
Samuel  Johnson.  Edited  by  G.  Birkbeck  Hill. 
Oxford:  The  Clarendon  Press.  1887.  Vathek, 
an  Arabian  Tale.  By  William  Beckford. 
London  :  Routledge,  1912.  The  Life  and  Adven- 
tures of  Peter  Wilkins.  By  Robert  Paltock"? 
[1751].    London:    Reeves    &    Turner.      1884. 


298  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


This  is  a  facsimile  reprint  of  the  first  edition 
in  2  vols.,  edited  by  A.  H.  Bullen.) 
The  picaresque  novel ;  Defoe. 

*Captain  Singleton  [1720],  Colonel  Jacques 
[1722],  * Memoirs  of  a  Cavalier  [1720],  Duncan 
Campbell,  etc.  In  The  Works  of  Daniel  De- 
foe, edited  by  G.  H.  Maynadier.  Boston:  Old 
Corner  Bookstore.     16  vols. 

For  the  ancestry  of  this  type,  see  Warren's 
account  of  the  Spanish  picaresque  romance  (of 
which  Cervantes'  Don  Quixote  is  a_parody)  ;  also 
the  account  of  Nash's  Jack  Wilton  in  Gosse's  In- 
troduction. The  one  definite  Spanish  proto- 
type of  the  rogue-novel  is  now  accessible  in 
English:  Lazarillo  de  Tormes.  Tr.  by  Louis 
How.     New  York:  Mitchell  Kennerley.    1917. 

Later  developments  of  the  picaresque  novel 
are  exemplified  by  Fielding's  History  of  Mr. 
Jonathan  Wild  the  Great  [1743],  Smollett's 
Roderick  Random  [1748]  and  Peregrine  Pickle 
[1751],  and  Thackeray's  Luck  of  Barry  Lyn- 
don [1844].  Dickens's  *  Oliver  Twist  [1838] 
owes  something  to  the  same  tradition;  as  also, 
in  another  way,  does  Stevenson's  *  Treasure 
Island  [1883]. 

The    student    should    consult    Romances    of 
Roguery,  by  Frank  Chandler  Wadleigh.    New 
York:  The  Macmillan  Co.     1899. 
The  biographical  novel;  Defoe. 

*The  Life  and  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe. 
By  Daniel  Defoe  [1719].  (For  edition,  see 
above.)     Also,  certain  of  the  picaresque  novels 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  299 

of  Defoe  are  biographic  in  form;  notably, 
Memoirs  of  a  Cavalier  and  Duncan  Campbell. 
This  development  leads  straight  to  the  most 
characteristic  novels  of  the  great  school  of 
eighteenth-century  realism  (e.  g.,  *Tom  Jones) 
and  of  the  Victorian  period  (e.  g.,  *  David 
Copperfield  and  *Pendennis).  To  a  certain 
slight  extent,  Aphra  Behn  is  Defoe's  predeces- 
sor in  the  biographical  novel. 

On  Defoe,  see  Daniel  Defoe,  by  William 
Minto.  (New  York:  1879.  English  Men  of 
Letters) ;  also,  the  essay  on  Defoe  in  Vol.  1  of 
Hours  in  a  Library,  by  Leslie  Stephen.  (New 
York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     1894.     4  vols.) 

For  a  general  account  of  the  novel  of  man- 
ners in  this  period,  and  an  exhaustive  bibliog- 
raphy, consult  Miss  Morgan's  The  Rise  of  the 
Novel  of  Manners.  The  Cambridge  History  is 
notably  helpful  on  the  seventeenth  century. 

VII.  The  realists  from  Richardson  to  Jane  Austen. 
Samuel  Richardson. 

*  Pamela;  or,  Virtue  Rewarded  [1740].  Clar- 
issa Harlowe;  or,  The  History  of  a  Young  Lady 
[1748].  The  History  of  Sir  Charles  Grandison 
[1753].  By  Samuel  Richardson.  In  Richard- 
son's Works.  London:  Chapman  &  Hall.  20 
vols.     1902. 

Samuel  Richardson.  By  Austin  Dobson. 
New  York.  1902.  (English  Men  of  Letters.) 
Also,  essays  on  Richardson  in  Letters  on  Litera- 
ture,  by   Andrew   Lang    (London:    Longmans, 


300  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1889)  ;    Res    Judicatae,    by    Augustine    Birrell 
(New  York:   Charles   Scribner's   Sons.     1897); 
and  Vol.  1  of  Leslie  Stephen's  Hours  in  a  Li- 
brary. 
Henry  Fielding. 

*The  History  of  the  Adventures  of  Joseph 
Andrews  [1742].  *The  History  of  Tom  Jones, 
A  Foundling  [1749].  Amelia  [1751].  (For 
Jonathan  Wild,  see  VI.,  under  the  picaresque 
novel,  above.)  In  The  Works  of  Henry  Field- 
ing. Edited,  with  a  biographical  essay  by  Leslie 
Stephen.  London:  Smith,  Elder  &  Co.  1882. 
10  vols.  American  edition :  Edited  by  G.  H. 
Maynadier.  New  York:  Athenaeum  Society. 
1903.    12  vols. 

Fielding.     By   Austin   Dobson.     New   York. 
1883.      (English   Men   of   Letters).     Essays  in 
Andrew  Lang's  Letters  on  Literature  and  Vol.  2 
of  Leslie  Stephen's  Hours  in  a  Library. 
Tobias  George  Smollett. 

Roderick  Random  [1748].  Peregrine  Pickle 
[1751].  Ferdinand,  Count  Fathom  [1753]. 
Sir  Lancelot  Greaves  [1762].  Humphrey  Clin- 
ker [1771].  In  The  Works  of  Tobias  George 
Smollett,  edited  with  introduction  by  G.  H.  May- 
nadier. Boston:  Old  Corner  Bookstore.  1902. 
12  vols.  For  Roderick  Random  and  Peregrine- 
Pickle,  see  the  picaresque  novel,  under  VI, 
above.  Ferdinand,  Count  Fathom  is  an  inferior 
example  of  much  the  same  type.  Sir  Lancelot 
Greaves  is  in  the  mode  of  Cervantes;  it  should 
be  noted  that  Smollett  did,  with  evident  gusto,  a 
translation  of  Don  Quixote.    Note  in  Humphrey 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  301 

Clinker  the  occurrence  of  the  letter-form  as 
practised  by  Richardson.  This  alone  of  Smol- 
lett's novels  is  realistic  in  both  form  and  sub- 
stance. 

Life  of  Tobias  George  Smollett.  By  David 
Hannay.  London :  Walter  Scott.  1887. 
(Great  Writers  Series.) 

Laurence  Sterne. 

*The  Life  and  Opinions  of  Tristram  Shandy 
[1759-67].  A  Sentimental  Journey  [1768].  In 
The  Complete  Works  of  Laurence  Sterne. 
With  an  introduction  by  W.  L.  Cross.  New 
York:  The  Colonial  Society.  1904.  6  vols. 
This  edition  includes  the  Life  by  Percy  Fitz- 
gerald, which  see. 

Sterne.  By  H.  D.  Traill.  New  York.  1882. 
(English  Men  of  Letters.)  The  Life  and  Times 
of  Laurence  Sterne.  By  Wilbur  L.  Cross. 
New  York:  The  Macmillan  Company.  1909. 
Essays  in  Augustine  Birrell's  Men,  Women,  and 
Books;  Leslie  Stephen's  Hours  in  a  Library, 
Vol.  3;  and  Shelburne  Essays,  Third  Series,  by 
Paul  Elmer  More.  (New  York:  G.  P.  Put- 
nam's Sons.    1904-10.) 

Oliver  Goldsmith. 

*The  Vicar  of  Wakefield  [1766].  Vol.  2  of 
The  Works  of  Oliver  Goldsmith.  Edited  by 
Peter  Cunningham,  and  including  Forster's  Life. 
Boston:     The  Jefferson  Press.     1900.     12  vols. 

Frances  Burney  (Mme.  D'Arblay). 

"Evelina  [1778]  and  Cecilia  [1782].  In 
Bohn's   Novelist    Library.     London.     1883    and 


302  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1882.     Each,  2  vols.     Cecilia.    New  York:  The 
Macmillan  Co.     1904. 

Fanny    Burney.     By    Austin    Dobson,    New 
York:     The    Macmillan     Co.    1903.     (English 
Men  of  Letters).     Essay  in  More's  Shelhurne 
Essays,  Fourth  Series. 
Maria  Edgeworth. 

*Castle  Rackrent  [1800]  and  *The  Absentee 
[1801].  Both  in  No.  410  of  Everyman's  Li- 
brary. (New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.) 
Belinda  [1801].  Leonora  [1806].  Helen  [1834]. 
In  the  Longford  Edition  of  her  Works.  Lon- 
don.    1893.     10  vols. 

Maria  Edgeworth.  By  Emily  Lawless.  Lon- 
don: The  Macmillan  Co.  1903.  (English  Men 
of  Letters).  For  Miss  Edgeworth's  influence 
on  Scott,  see  Brander  Matthews'  introduction 
to  Castle  Rackrent  and  The  Absentee  in  Every- 
man's Library. 
Jane  Austen. 

*Pride  and  Prejudice  [1813].  *  Sense  and 
Sensibility  [1811].  *  Northanger  Abbey  [1818]. 
*  Mansfield  Park  [1814].  * Persuasion  [1818]. 
*Emma  [1816].  In  The  Works  of  Jane  Austen. 
London :  Chatto  &  Windus.    1908.    10  vols. 

Life  of  Jane  Austen.  By  Goldwin  Smith. 
London:  1890.  (Great  Writers  Series.) 
On  the  period  as  a  whole,  see,  besides  Cross,  Raleigh, 
Saintsbury's  English  Novel,  and  The  Cambridge  His- 
tory, A  History  of  Eighteenth  Century  Literature,  by 
Edmund  Gosse  (London.  1889) ;  and  English  Litera- 
ture and  Society  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  Leslie 
Stephen   (New  York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     1904). 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  303 

Thackeray's  Lectures  on  *Tlie  English  Humorists 
(Vol.  5  of  Works;  see  X.,  below)  treats  the  humorous 
realists  from  Congreve  to  Steme. 

VIII.  Gothic  and  Oriental  romances;  the  School  of  Terror, 
etc. 

*The  Life  and  Adventures  of  Peter  Wilkins.  By- 
Robert  Paltock  [1751].  London:  Reeves  &  Tur- 
ner.    1884. 

The  Castle  of  Otranto.  By  Horace  Walpole 
[1764].  London.  1892.  In  CasselPs  National 
Library.  Essay  on  Walpole  in  Vol.  1  of  Leslie 
Stephen's  Hours  in  a  Library. 

The  Old  English  Baron.  By  Clara  Reeve  [1777]. 
The  Castle  of  Otranto  and  The  Old  English 
Baron  have  been  reprinted  together  by  Warne, 
1872,  and  by  Nimmo,  1883,  and  separately  in 
CasselPs  National  Library. 

The  Mysteries  of  Udolpho.  By  Anne  Radcliffe 
[1794].  New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  1903. 
The  Romance  of  the  Forest.  By  the  same. 
[1791].  New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  1904. 
A  Sicilian  Romance  [1709]  and  The  Italian;  or, 
the  Confessional  of  the  Black  Penitent  [1797], 
the  latter  perhaps  the  best  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe's 
romances,  are  out  of  print. 

The  Monk;  a  Romance.  By  Matthew  Gregory 
("Monk")  Lewis.  Also  entitled  Ambrosio;  or, 
The  Monk.  [1795].  New  York:  E.  P.  Dut- 
ton &  Co.    1907. 

Caleb  Williams;  or,  Things  as  They  Are.  By 
William  Godwin.  [1795].  London  :  Routledge, 
1904.  St.  Leon  [1799]  and  Fleetwood  [1805] 
are  out  of  print.     See  essay  on  Godwin's  Novels 


304  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

iii  Leslie  Stephen's  Studies  of  a  Biographer 
(London:  Duckworth  &  Co.  4  vols.  1899- 
1902). 

Melmoth  the  Wanderer  [1820].  By  Charles  Rob- 
ert Maturin.  London:  Richard  Bentley  &  Son. 
1892.  3  vols.  This  edition  contains  a  memoir 
and  a  valuable  bibliography  of  Maturin's 
works. 

*  Frankenstein;  or,  The  Modern  Prometheus 
[1818].  By  Mary  Wollstonecraft  (Godwin) 
Shelley.  New  York :  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  No. 
616  of  Everyman's  Library.  Tales  and  Stories. 
By  Mary  Wollstonecraft  (Godwin)  Shelley. 
London.  1891.  Introduction  by  Richard  Gar- 
nett.  (Treasure  house  of  tales  by  great  au- 
thors. ) 

Crotchet  Castle  [1831].  By  Thomas  Love  Pea- 
cock. London :  J.  M.  Dent  &  Co.  1891.  Edited 
by  Richard  Garnett.  In  the  same  edition,  Gryll 
Grange  [1860],  1891,  2  vols.;  *Headlong  Rail 
[1816],  1892;  Maid  Marian  [1822],  1892; 
Melincourt  [1817],  1891;  * Nightmare  Abbey 
[1817],  1892;  and  The  Misfortunes  of  Elphin 
[1829],  1891. 

Essay  on  Peacock  in  Essays  in  English  Liter- 
ature, by  George  Saintsbury.  (London:  Per- 
cival  &  Co.     1891.) 

Klosterheim  [1832].  The  Avenger  [1838].  The 
Spanish  Military  Nun.  By  Thomas  De  Quincey. 
In  Vols.  12-13  of  The  Collected  Writings  of 
Thomas  De  Quincey.  Edited  by  David  Masson. 
London :  A.  &  C.  Black.    1896-97. 

For  Johnson's  Rasselas  and  Beckford's  Vathek, 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  305 


see  the  Utopian  romance,  etc.,  under  VI.  above; 
also  The  Oriental  Tale  in  England  in  the  Eight- 
eenth Century,  by  Martha  Pike  Conant. 

Note  the  influence  of  the  School  of  Terror  on  the 
historical  romances  of  Harrison  Ainsworth 
(see  IX.  below)  ;  also  on  the  Christmas  stories 
of  Dickens  (for  whom,  see  X.  below)  and  on 
Emily  Bronte's  Wuthering  Heights  (see  X.  be- 
low). 

*Tales  of  Mystery,  etc.  [1839-].  By  Edgar  Al- 
lan Poe.  Vols.  1-5  of  The  Works  of  Edgar 
Allan  Poe,  edited  by  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman 
and  George  Edward  Woodberry.  New  York: 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1894-5.  10  vols. 
For  memoir  and  introduction,  see  Vol.  1. 

*The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  [1851].  *The 
Scarlet  Letter  [1850].  *The  Marble  Faun 
[I860].  Septimius  Felton  [1872].  Dr.  Grim- 
shawe's  Secret  [1883],  By  Nathaniel  Haw- 
thorne. Vols.  3,  5-6,  11,  13  of  the  Standard 
Library  Edition  of  The  Works  of  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne.  Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 
1882-96.  Hawthorne.  By  Henry  James. 
New  York.  1879.  (English  Men  of  Letters). 
Nathaniel  Hawthorne.  By  George  E.  Wood- 
berry.  Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  1902 
(American  Men  of  Letters.) 

For  the  literary  ancestry  of  Poe  and  Hawthorne, 
see  the  First  Series  of  Shelbume  Essays,  by 
Paul  Elmer  More,  essay  on  The  Origins  of 
Hawthorne  and  Poe.  Two  excellent  modern 
estimates,  in  comparison  and  contrast  of  the 
two  writers,  are  the  essays  in  American  Prose 


306 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Masters,  by  W.  C.  Brownell.  (New  York; 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1909.) 

Note  the  conversion  of  the  novel  of  terror  into  the 
modern  pseudo-realistic  novel  of  mystery  and 
suspense  in  the  stories  of  Wilkie  Collins  (in 
New  Edition.  London:  Chatto  &  Windus. 
After  Dark  [1856],  1891;  The  Haunted  Hotel, 
1892;  *The  Woman  in  White  [1860],  1896;  Ar- 
madale [1866],  1897;  The  Moonstone  [1868], 
1897;  No  Name  [1862],  1898;  etc.);  also  in 
those  of  A.  Conan  Doyle  (e.  g.,  The  Hound  of 
the  Baskervilles  [1902].  New  York:  McClure, 
1902.  A  Study  in  Scarlet  [1887],  and  The  Sign 
of  the  Four  [1889].  New  York:  Harper  Bros. 
&  Co.,  1904).  See  also,  among  mid-nineteenth 
century  experiments  in  the  psychic,  Bulwer's 
Zanoni  [1842]  and  A  Strange  Story  [1862] 
(for  edition,  see  X.  below).  The  complete  as- 
similation of  the  element  of  terror,  mystery,  and 
supematuralism  into  the  modern  realistic  mode 
occurs  in  Henry  James's  Turn  of  the  Screw  and 
some  of  Rudyard  Kipling's  stories,  as  The  End 
of  the  Passage  and  The  Mark  of  the  Beast. 

For  a  general  treatment  and  valuable  biblio- 
graphical suggestions,  consult  The  Supernatural 
in  English  Fiction,  by  Dorothy  Scarborough 
(New  York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     1917). 

IX.  Historical  novels  and  romances. 

Queenhoo-Iiall;   a   romance.     By   Joseph    Strutt. 

Edinburgh.      [1808].     Finished   and  edited  by 

Sir  Walter  Scott.     Out  of  print. 
*The   Waverley  Novels.    New   York:   Harper  & 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  307 


Bros.  30  vols.  *Waverley  [1814]  (Vol.  1- 
2) ;  *Rob  Roy  [1817]  (Vol.  5) ;  *A  Legend  of 
Montrose  [1819]  (Vol.  6) ;  *The  Bride  of  Lam- 
mermoor  [1819]  (Vol.  10);  *Ivanhoe  [1819] 
(Vol.  11) ;  *Kenilworth  [1821]   (Vol.  14) ;  etc. 

Sir  Walter  Scott.  By  R.  H.  Hutton.  New 
York.  1S79.  (English  Men  of  Letters).  For 
detailed  study,  see  A  Key  to  the  Waverley 
Novels  in  chronological  sequence,  with  index  of 
characters,  by  Henry  Grey.  (New  edition. 
London,  1899).  Essay,  Scotch  Novels  and 
Scotch  History,  in  the  Third  Series  of  Paul  El- 
mer More's  Shelburne  Essays. 

Bulwer's  Works.  *Harold,  the  Last  of  the  Saxon 
Kings  [1848].  *The  Last  Days  of  Pompeii 
[1834].  *The  Last  of  the  Barons  [1843]. 
*Bienzi,  the  Last  of  the  Roman  Tribunes  [1835]. 
Leila  [1838].  Devereux  [1829].  By  Edward 
Bulwer-Lytton.     (See  also  under  VIII.  and  X.). 

Historical  Romances  of  Harrison  Ainsworth.  Vic- 
torian Edition.  Philadelphia:  George  Barrie  & 
Son.  20  vols.  Especially,  Jack  Sheppard 
[1839]  (Vol.  2)  ;  Windsor  Castle  [1843]  (Vol. 
10)  ;  and  *The  Tower  of  London  [1840]  (Vols. 
14-15).     See  VIII.  above. 

*Henry  Esmond  [1852].  *The  Virginians  [1858- 
9].  Denis  Duval  (unfinished)  [1867].  Vols.  3, 
10,  and  13  of  Biographical  Edition   (see  X.). 

*The  Cloister  and  the  Hearth.  By  Charles  Reade. 
[1861].    Vols.  1-2  of  Works.     (See  X.). 

*Romola.  By  George  Eliot  [1863].  In  Works 
(see  X.).     See  Chapter  IX  of  Leslie  Stephen's 


* 


308  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


George  Eliot.  (New  York:  The  Maemillan  Co. 
1902.  English  Men  of  Letters.) 
*Westward  Ho!  [1855].  *Hypatia  [1853]. 
*Herexoard  the  Wake  [1866].  By  Charles 
Kingsley.  Vols.  1-2,  9-10,  and  11-12  of  The 
Life  and  Works  of  Charles  Kingsley.  (New 
York:  The  Maemillan  Co.  1901-03.  19  vols.) 
See  X.  below. 

Essays  in  Vol.  3  of  Leslie  Stephen's  Hours 
in  a  Library,  and  Studies  in  Early  Victorian 
Literature,  by  Frederic  Harrison.  (London: 
Edward  Arnold.  1906.) 
Kidnapped  [1886]  and  David  Balfour  [sequel, 
1892].  The  Black  Arrow  [1888].  St.  Ives 
[1892].  The  Weir  of  Hermiston  [1896].  Vols. 
3,  8,  4,  11,  and  10,  respectively,  of  The  Works  of 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  Biographical  Edition. 
(New  York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1906.  25 
vols.) 

Essay  on  Stevenson  in  Vol.  4  of  Leslie  Ste- 
phen's Studies  of  a  Biographer.  See  also 
Stevenson's  Gossip  on  Romance,  in  Memories 
and  Portraits. 

Stevenson's  attempt  to  re-create  the  historical 
romance  of  Scott  marks  the  end  of  a  tradition. 
In  the  hands  of  his  successors,  who  may  be 
represented  by  Anthony  Hope  Hawkins  (The 
Prisoner  of  Zenda),  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  (Seats 
of  the  Mighty),  Justin  Huntly  McCarthy,  Stan- 
ley Weyman,  Francis  Marion  Crawford,  Mau- 
rice Hewlett,  Mary  Johnston,  and  Winston 
Churchill,  the  historical  romance  tends  to  be- 
come sentimental  melodrama.     More  nearly  in 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  309 

the  vein  of  Scott  is  The  White  Company,  b}'  A. 
Conan  Doyle  [1891].  (London:  Smith,  Elder. 
1891.) 

The  most  successful  part  of  Stevenson's  in- 
fluence appears  to  have  been  exerted  through 
^Treasure  Island  (Vol.  1)  rather  than  through 
the  primarily  historical  romances.  The  most 
Stevensonian  of  writers  after  Stevenson  is  Sir 
Arthur  T.  Quiller-Coueh  (note  his  skilfully 
written  concluding-  chapters  of  Stevenson's  un- 
finished St.  Ives).  See  Early  Novels  and  Stor- 
ies by  "  Q."  New  York:  Charles  Seribner's 
Sons.     Uniform  Edition,  9  vols. 

Marius  the  Epicurean.  By  Walter  Horatio  Pater. 
London :  Macmillan  &  Co.     1892.     2  vols. 

The  Valley  of  Decision.  By  Edith  Wharton. 
New  York:  Charles  ScribnePs  Sons.  1902. 
2  vols.  (Fifth  and  subsequent  impressions  in 
one  vol.) 

Veramlda.  By  George  Gissing.  London :  Con- 
stable &  Co.,  1903.  (Posthumous;  unfinished.) 
For  a  very  thorough  and  painstaking  bibliog- 
raphy of  the  whole  cycle  of  historical  fiction  to 
the  present  time,  see  A  Guide  to  Historical 
Fiction,  by  Ernest  A.  Baker.  (New  York:  The 
Macmillan  Co.    1914.) 

X.  Victorian  realism   and  pseudo-realism. 
A.  The  novelists  of  manners,  etc. 
Charles  Dickens. 

Works,  Biographical  Edition,  with  introduc- 
tions by  Arthur  Waugh.     (London:   Chapman 


310  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

&  Hall.     20  vols.)     Works,  illustrated  edition. 
(New  York:  The  Maemillan  Co.    20  vols.) 

*The  Pickwick  Papers  [1837].  * Nicholas 
Nickleby  [1839].  *Martin  Chuzzlewit  [1844]. 
*Dombey  and  Son  [1848].  *  David  Copperfield 
[1850].  *  Bleak  House  [1853].  *Hard  Times 
[1854].  *  Little  Dorrit  [1857].  *  Great  Ex- 
pectations [1859].  *  Our  Mutual  Friend  [18G5]. 
*The  Mystery  of  Edwin  Brood  [posthumous, 
1870]. 

Note  that  *A  Tale  of  Two  Cities  [1859]  and 
*Barnaby  Pudge  [1840-1]  are  classifiable  un- 
der the  historical  novel  (IX.). 

Charles  Dickens;  a  critical  study.  By  G.  K. 
Chesterton.  New  York:  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co., 
190G.  Charles  Dickens;  a  critical  study.  By 
George  Gissing.  London:  Blackie.  Essays  in 
Corrected  Impressions,  by  George  Saintsbury 
(London:  W.  Heinemann.  1895),  Frederic 
Harrison's  Studies  in  Early  Victorian  Litera- 
ture, and  the  Fifth  Series  of  More's  Shelburne 
Essays. 
The  Brontes. 

*Jane  Eyre  [1847].  *The  Professor  [1857]. 
* Shirley  [1849].  •ViUette  [1853].  By  Char- 
lotte Bronte.  *The  Tenant  of  Wildfell  Hall 
[1848]  By  Anne  Bronte.  *Wuthering  Heights 
[1847].  By  Emily  Bronte  (see  also  VIII, 
above).  In  The  Life  and  Works  of  the  Sis- 
ters Bronte.  New  York :  Harper  &  Bros. 
1899-1900.  7  vols.  This  edition  includes  Mrs. 
Gaskell's  *Life  of  Charlotte  Bronte,  which  see. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  311 

An  edition  of  Wuthering  Heights  published 
by  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  (New  York.  1907) 
contains  a  bibliography  of  the  Brontes. 

Essays  in  George  Saintsbury's  Corrected  Im- 
pressions, Frederic  Harrison's  Studies  in  Early 
Victorian  Literature,  and  Vol.  3  of  Leslie  Ste- 
phen's Hours  in  a  Library. 
William  Makepeace  Thackeray. 

Works,  Biographical  Edition.  New  York: 
Harper  &  Bros.  1898-1903.  13  vols.  See  IX. 
above;  and,  for  Barry  Lyndon,  VI.  *  Vanity 
Fair  [1847-8].  *Pendennis  [1849-50].  *The 
Newcomes  [1854-5]. 

Vol.  13  contains  the  Life  by  Leslie  Stephen, 
and  a  bibliography.  See  also  the  Life  by  An- 
thony Trollope.  (New  York:  1879.  English 
Men  of  Letters.) 

Essays  in  Saintsbury's  Corrected  Impres- 
sions, Harrison's  Studies  in  Early  Victorian 
Literature,  and  Victorian  Prose  Masters,  by  W. 
C.  Brown  ell.  (New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons.  1915.) 
Edward  Bulwei'-Lytton. 

The  Caxtons  [1849].  "My  Novel,"  by  Pisis- 
tratus  Caxton;  or,  Varieties  in  English  Life 
[1853].  What  Will  He  Do  With  It?  [1858]. 
Kenelm  Chillingly  [1873].  In  Bulwer's  Works. 
London:    George  Routledge  &  Sons. 

See  also  VIII.  and  IX.  above. 
Benjamin  Disraeli,  1st  Earl  of  Beaconsfield. 

Vivian  Grey  [1826].  Contarini  Fleming 
[1832].      Lothair    [1870].      Endymion    [1880]. 


312  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

In  The  Novels  and  Tales  of  Benjamin  Disraeli. 
London.     1900.     11  vols. 

See  also  B.  below. 

Essays  in  Harrison's  Studies  in  Early  Victo- 
rian Literature  and  Vol.  2  of  Stephen's  Hours 
in  a  Library. 
Mrs.  Elizabeth  Cleghorn  Gaskell. 

Works,  with  introductions  by  A.  W.  Ward. 
London :  Smith,  Elder  &  Co. ;  New  York : 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1906-11.  8  vols. 
*Cranford  [1853];  Ruth  [1853];  *Sijlvia's 
Lovers  [1863]. 

See  also  B.  below. 

Essay  in  the  Fifth  Series  of  More's  Shelburne 
Essays. 
Charles  Reade. 

Works.  Boston:  Dana  Estes.  18  vols. 
Hard  Cash  [1863].  Griffith  Gaunt  [1866].  A 
Terrible  Temptation  [1871].   Foul  Play  [1869]. 

Perhaps  more  common  is  the  "Copyright 
Edition,"  Collection  of  British  Authors  (Leip- 
zig: Tauchnitz). 

See,   for   The   Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  IX. 
above. 
George  Eliot  (Marian  Evans  Cross). 

Works,  Standard  Edition,  21  vols.  New 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  *Adam  Bede 
[1859].  *The  Mill  on  the  Floss  [I860];  Mid- 
dlemarch  [1871-2].  *  Silas  Marner  [1861]. 
Daniel  Deronda  [1876].  For  Romola,  see  IX. 
above;  for  Felix  Holt  the  Radical,  B.  below. 

George    Eliot.     By     Leslie     Stephen.      New 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  313 

York:  The  Macmillan  Co.  1902.  (English 
Men  of  Letters.)  Essays  in  Saintsbury's  Cor- 
rected Impressions  ;  Harrison's  Studies  in  Early 
Victorian  Literature ;  Vol.  3  of  Stephen's 
Hours  in  a  Library;  and  Brownell's  Victorian 
Prose  Masters. 
Anthony  Trollope. 

*The  Barchester  Novels,  in  order:  *The  War- 
den [1855]  ;  *  Barchester  Towers  [1857]  ;  *Doc- 
tor  Thome  [1858] ;  *Framley  Parsonage  [1861] ; 
*The  Small  House  at  Allington  [1864];  *The 
Last  Chronicle  of  Barset  [1867]. 

Other  works,  Parliamentary  novels,  etc. : 
Can  You  Forgive  Her?  [1864-5] ;  Phineas  Finn, 
the  Irish  Member  [1866] ;  Phineas  Redux 
[1874]  ;  The  Eustace  Diamonds  [1872] ;  The 
Way  We  Live  Now  [1875]. 

These  are  now  most  commonly  seen  in  the 
"Copyright  Edition,"  Collection  of  British  Au- 
thors (Leipzig:  Tauchnitz).  Also,  several  of 
the  Parliamentary  and  Manor  House  novels  are 
published  by  Dodd,  Mead  and  Co.,  New  York, 
1910-. 

See    also     Trollope's     Autobiography     (New 
York:  Dodd,  Mead  and  Co.,  1910.)     Essays  in 
Saintsbury's  Corrected  Impressions  and  Harri- 
son's Studies  in  Early  Victorian  Literature. 
Margaret  Oliphant  Oliphant. 

Passages  in  the  Life  of  Mistress  Margaret  Mart- 
land  [1849].  Lilliesleaf  [sequel,  1856].  Both 
published  by  Ward  and  Locke,  London.  *Salem 
Chapel  [18*63].     The  Rector  [1863];  The  Doc- 


314  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

tor's  Family  [1863] ;  and  The  Perpetual  Curate 
[1864].  Published  in  1  vol.,  Blackwood,  Lon- 
don. Miss  Mar  joribanks  [1866].  London: 
Blackwood.  Phoebe,  Junior:  the  Last  Chronicle 
of  Carlingford  [1876].  London:  Hurst  and 
Blackett. 

Published,  under  the  collective  title  "Chron- 
icles of  Carlingford,"   in   the   "Copyright  Edi- 
tion," Collection  of  British  Authors   (Leipzig: 
Tauchnitz). 
George  Meredith. 

Works  of  George  Meredith,  Memorial  Edi- 
tion. New  York:  Charles  Scribneris  Sons. 
1909-12.  29  vols.  The  Ordeal  of  Richard 
Fever  el  [1859],  2;  Sandra  Belloni  [1864] 
(originally,  Emilia  in  England),  3-4;  Rhoda 
Fleming  [1865],  5;  Evan  Harrington  [1861],  6; 
Vittoria  [1866]  (sequel  to  Sandra  Belloni),  7- 
8;  The  Adventures  of  Harry  Richmond  [1871], 
9-10;  Beauchamp's  Career  [1876],  11-12;  The 
Egoist  [1879],  13-14;  The  Tragic  Comedians 
[1880],  15;  Diana  of  the  Crossways  [1885],  16; 
One  of  Our  Conquerors  [1891],  17;  Lord  Or- 
mont  and  His  Aminta  [1894],  18;  The  Amazing 
Marriage  [1895],  19;  The  House  on  the  Beach 
[1895],  22. 

George  Meredith;  his  life  and  art.  By  J.  A. 
Hammerton.  New  and  revised  edition.  Edin- 
burgh, 1911.  Essays  in  the  Second  Series  of 
More's  Shelburne  Essays  and  Brownell's  Vic- 
torian Prose  Masters.  See  also  Meredith's  Es- 
say on  the  Idea  of  Comedy  and  of  the  Uses  of 
the  Comic  Spirit,  Vol.  23. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  315 


William  Black. 

The  Strange  Adventures  of  a  Phaeton  [1872 j. 
London :  Maemillan  &  Co.  1878.  Madcap  Vio- 
let [1877].  London:  Maemillan  &  Co.  1880. 
White  Wings;  a  yachting  romance  [1880].  Lon- 
don: Maemillan  &  Co.  1882.  Shandon  Bells 
[1883].  New  York:  A.  L.  Burt  (The  Manhat- 
tan Library). 
Henry  James. 

Novels  and  Tales,  New  York  Edition.  New 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1907-09. 
24  vols.  Roderick  Hudson  [1875],  1;  The 
American  [1877],  2;  Portrait  of  a  Lady  [1881], 
3-4;  The  Tragic  Muse  [1891],  7-8;  The  Awk- 
ward Age  [1899],  9;  What  M aisie  Knew  [1897], 
11;  The  Ambassadors  [1903],  21-22;  The  Wings 
of  the  Dove  [1902],  19-20;  The  Golden  Bowl 
[1905],  23-24. 

Uncollected:  The  Sacred  Fount.  (New 
York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  1901.)  The 
Sense  of  the  Past  and  The  Ivory  Tower  (both 
posthumous.  New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons.     1917). 

See  also,  in  the  New  York  Edition,  the  fol- 
lowing1 modern  novelle,  illustrating  the  expan- 
sion of  the  short-story  into  a  modification  of  the 
novel:  Daisy  Miller  [1878],  18;  A  London 
Life  [1888],  10;  The  Spoils  of  Poynton  [1897], 
10;  The  Aspern  Papers  [1888],  12;  The  Turn 
of  the  Screw  [1898]  (see  also  under  VIII.),  12; 
The  Author  of  Beltraffio  [1885],  16;  and  The 
Altar  of  the  Dead  [1895],  17. 


316  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Henry  James.  By  Ford  Madox  Hueffer. 
London:  Martin  Seeker.  1913.  Henry  James. 
By  Rebecca  West.  New  York :  Henry  Holt  and 
Company.  1916  (Writers  of  the  Day).  Essay 
in  Brownell's  American  Prose  Masters. 

See,  above  all,  the  author's  prefaces  to  the 
volumes  of  the  New  York  Edition. 
William  Dean  Howells. 

Their  Wedding  Journey  [1871].  Boston: 
Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  Their  Silver  Wedding 
Journey  [1899,  sequel].  New  York:  Harper 
Bros.  A  Foregone  Conclusion  [1875].  Bos- 
ton: Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  The  Lady  of  the 
"Aroostook"  [1878].  Boston:  Houghton  Mif- 
flin Co.  The  Undiscovered  Country  [1880]. 
Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  Doctor  Breen's 
Practice  [1881].  Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 
A  Modern  Instance  [1883].  Boston:  Hough- 
ton Mifflin  Co.  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham 
[1885].  Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  The 
Minister's  Charge;  or,  the  Apprenticeship  of 
Lemuel  Barker  [1887].  Boston:  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co.  Annie  Kilburn  [1888].  New  York: 
Harper  Bros.  The  Quality  of  Mercy  [1892]. 
New  York:  Harper  Bros.  A  Traveller  from 
Altruria  [1894].  New  York:  Harper  Bros. 
The  Story  of  a  Play  [1898].  New  York:  Har- 
per Bros.  The  Kentons  [1902].  New  York: 
Harper  Bros.  The  Son  of  Royal  Langbrith 
[1904].  New  York:  Harper  Bros.  Fennel  and 
Rue    [1908].     New   York:   Harper  Bros.     The 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  317 

Leather-wood    God    [1916].     New    York:    The 
Century  Co. 

William  Dean  Howells.  By  Alexander  Har- 
vey. New  York:  B.  W.  Huebsck.  1917.  See 
also  My  Literary  Passions  (by  W.  D.  Howells. 
New  York:  Harper  &  Bros.  1895)  and  Litera- 
ture and  Life  (by  the  same.  New  York:  Har- 
per &  Bros.  1902). 
An  interesting  twentieth-century  reversion  to  the 
form  and  spirit  of  the  Early  Victorian  novel 
is  the  fiction  of  William  De  Morgan :  Joseph 
Vance;  Alice-For-Short;  It  Never  Can  Happen 
Again;  Somehow  Good;  A  Likely  Story;  When 
Ghost  Meets  Ghost.  New  York:  Henry  Holt 
and  Company.  1906-14.  Note  that  De  Mor- 
gan's choice  of  a  technique  was  quite  deliberate: 
his  fifth  novel,  An  Affair  of  Dishonor  (New 
York:  Holt.  1911),  is  a  strictly  modern  piece 
of  naturalism. 
B.  Novelists  of  Protests;  social  satirists. 

Benjamin  Disraeli,  1st  Earl  of  Beaconsfield. 

*Coningsby;  or,  The  New  Generation  [1844]. 
Sybil;  or,  The  Two  Nations  [1845].     Tancred; 
or,    The   New    Crusade    [1844].    Vols.   7-9    of 
Novels  and  Tales.     See  A.  above. 
Mrs.  Elizabeth  Cleghorn  Gaskell. 

*Mary    Barton    [1848].     *North    and    South 
[1855].     Vols.    1    and   4    of    Works.     See    A. 
above. 
Charles  Kingsley. 

*  Alton    Locke    the    Tailor     [1850].     *Teast 


318  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[1851].     Vols.  7-8  and  15  of  Life  and  Works. 
See  IX.  above. 
Sir  Walter  Besant. 

Children   of   Gibeon    [1886].     All  Sorts  and 
Conditions  of  Men  [1882].     New  York:  Harper 
&   Bros.     1902. 
George  Gissing. 

Demos;  a  story  of  English  Socialism  [1886]. 
London:  Smith,  Elder  &  Co.  Thyrza  [1887]. 
London:  Smith,  Elder  &  Co.  1907.  In  the 
Year  of  Jubilee  [1894].  New  York:  Appleton. 
The  New  Grub  Street  [1891].  London:  Smith, 
Elder.  Will  Warburton.  London :  A.  Con- 
stable &  Co.  1905.  The  Whirlpool  [1897]. 
New  York:  Stokes.  The  Private  Papers  of 
Henry  Ryecroft  [1903].  New  York:  E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co.  1903  (also  No.  46  of  Boni  & 
Liveright's  Modern  Library,  New  York,  with 
introduction  by  Paul  Elmer  More).  The  Odd 
Women   [1893].     New  York:  Macmillan. 

George  Gissing.  By  Frank  Swinnerton. 
London:  Martin  Seeker.  The  Private  Life  of 
Henry  Maitland;  a  record  dictated  by  J.  H. 
Revised  and  edited  by  Morley  Roberts.  New 
York:  George  H.  Doran  Co.  1912.  (A  thinly 
disguised  biography  of  Gissing,  with  a  liberal 
admixture  of  criticism.) 

Essay  in  the  Fifth  Series  of  More's  Shelburne 
Essays. 

See  also  IX.  above. 
Note  that  Reade's  It  Is  Never  Too  Late  to  Mend 
and  Put  Yourself  in  His  Place,  Dickens's  Hard 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  319 

Times,  and  George  Eliot's  *Felix  Holt  the  Radi- 
cal (see  A.  above)  turn  partly  on  economic  con- 
ditions and  struggles  of  class.  Reade's  Hard 
Cash  and  Foul  Play,  and  many  of  Dickens's 
novels,  as  Nicholas  Nickleby  and  Oliver  Twist, 
contain  strong  elements  of  protest  against  par- 
ticular isolated  abuses. 

George  Bernard  Shaw. 

Love  Among  the  Artists  [1889].  The  Irra- 
tional Knot  [1905].  An  Unsocial  Socialist 
[1887].  Cashell  Byron's  Profession  [1886], 
Written  1880-.  New  York:  Brentano's.  1909- 
10. 

Samuel  Butler. 

The  Way  of  All  Flesh.  Written  1872-84. 
Published  1903  (posthumous).  New  York:  E. 
P.  Dutton  &  Co.  1913.  Also  No.  13  of  Boni 
&  Liveright's  Modern  Library,  New  York.  See 
also  VI.  above. 
A  great  deal  of  the  most  characteristic  social  real- 
ism of  1903-18  shows  markedly  the  influence  of 
Butler — notably,  the  work  of  Gilbert  Cannan, 
J.  D.  Beresford,  Compton  Mackenzie,  W.  L. 
George,  Elinor  Mordaunt,  W.  B.  Maxwell,  and 
St.  John  G.  Ervine. 
C.  Novelists  of  Local  Colour,  etc. 

James  Fenimore   Cooper    (the  American   Indian, 
etc.). 

Collected  Writings,  Iroquois  Edition  New 
York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  1906.  The 
Leatherstocking  Tales,  Vols.  5,  11,  18,  20,  21. 
(*The   Deerslayer    [1841];    *The   Last   of   the 


320  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Mohicans  [1826] ;  *The  Pathfinder  [1840] ; 
*The  Pioneers  [1823];  *The  Prairie  [1826].) 
The  Bravo,  2 ;  The  Pilot,  19 ;  The  Spy,  27. 

Cooper  shows  the  influence  of  Scott,  who  in 
turn  shows  that  of  Maria  Edgeworth.  See  VII. 
above. 

Essay  on  Cooper  in  Brownell's  American 
Prose  Masters.  See  also  Howells's  My  Literary 
Passions. 

Samuel  Lover  (Ireland  and  the  Irish). 

*  Handy  Andy  [1842-3].  New  York:  The 
Athenaeum  Society.  2  vols.  (Copyright,  1901, 
Boston:  Little,  Brown  &  Co.) 

Suggestions  for  reading  and  study  of  Irish 
local  colour  may  be  found  in  Irish  Life  in  Irish 
Fiction,  by  Horatio  Sheafe  Krans  (New  York: 
The  Macmillan  Co.     1903). 

Charles  Lever   (Irish  life;  military  life). 

Military  Novels  (Charles  O'Malley  [1841], 
etc.).  New  York  Athemeum  Society.  7  vols. 
Novels  of  Adventure  (*Harry  Lorrequer  [1839- 
40],  etc.).  New  York:  Athemeum  Society.  5 
vols. 

Frederick  Marryatt  (Sailors  and  the  sea;  the 
Royal  Navy). 

*Masterman  Ready  [1841].  *  Jacob  Faithful 
[1834].  The  Phantom  Ship  [1839].  *The 
King's  Own  [1830].  *Mr.  Midshipman  Easy 
[1836].  *Peter  Simple  [1834].  In  The  Nov- 
els of  Capt.  Marryatt.  New  York:  E.  P.  Dut- 
ton  &  Co. 

Note  that  the  beginning  of  this  tradition  in 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  321 

the  novel  is  in  Smollett's  Boderick  Random  and 
Peregrine  Pickle  (see  VII.  above). 
George  Borrow  (Gipsies;  Vagabondia;  Wales). 

*Lavengro  [1851].  *The  Romany  Rye 
[1857].  *The  Bible  in  Spain  [1843].  *Wild 
Wales.     London :  John  Murray.     1896-. 

George  Borrow  and  His  Circle.  By  Clement 
King  Shorter.  Boston :  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 
1913.  In  the  Footsteps  of  Borrow  and  Fitz- 
gerald. By  Morley  Adams.  London :  Jarrold 
&  Sons.     1915. 

Essays  in  Birrell's  Res  Judicata  and  Saint- 
bury' s  Essays  in  English  Literature. 
Note,  in  Emily  Bronte's  Wuthering  Heights  and  in 
the  romances  of  Hawthorne  (see  VIII.  and  A. 
above),  the  union  of  local  colour  with  the  ele- 
ment of  mystery  or  horror. 
George  Macdonald    (Scotland). 

*Sir  Gibbie  [1879].     New  York:  E.  P.  Dut- 
ton  &  Co.     (No.  678  of  Everyman's  Library.) 
Mrs.    Elizabeth    Cleghorn    Gaskell    (English    pro- 
vincial life). 

Ruth;  *Phyllis;  *Cranford;  etc.  See  A. 
above. 
Note  that  George  Eliot's  early  "novels  of  memory" 
(Adam  Bede,  The  Mill  on  the  Floss,  Silas  Mar- 
ner)  are  also  strongly  provincial  in  their  real- 
ism. Trollope's  Barchester  Novels  and  Mrs. 
Oliphant's  Chronicles  of  Carlingford  are  al- 
most equally  regional.  See  A.  above.  Note 
also,  among  reprints  of  the  early  (Irish)  novels 
of  Trollope,  The  Macdermots  of  Ballycloran. 
London :  Ward,  Locke  &  Co. 


322  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Richard  Doddridge  Blackmore   (Devonshire). 

*Loma  Boone;  a  romance  of  Exmoor. 
*Springhaven.  New  York :  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 
(Nos.  304  and  350  of  Everyman's  Library.) 

Thomas  Hardy  ("Wessex"). 

Under  the  Greenwood  Tree  [1872].  Far 
From  the  Madding  Crowd  [1874].  The  Mayor 
of  Casterbridge  [1886].  A  Pair  of  Blue  Eyes 
[1872-3].  The  Woodlanders  [1887].  The  Re- 
turn of  the  Native  [1878].  The  Well-Beloved 
[1897].  Tess  of  the  D'Urbevilles  [1891].  Jude 
the  Obscure  [1895].  New  York:  Harper  & 
Bros. 

Thomas  Hardy.  By  Harold  Child.  New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co.  1916.  (Writers 
of  the  Day.)  A  Bibliography  of  the  Works  of 
Thomas  Hardy,  1865-1915.  By  A.  P.  Webb. 
London :  F.  Hollings.  1916.  The  Wessex  of  Ro- 
mance. By  Wilkinson  Sherren.  New  and  re- 
vised edition.  London :  Chapman  &  Hall. 
1908.  (Bibliography,  pp.  286-95.)  George 
Eliot  and  Thomas  Hardy.  By  Lina  Wright 
Berle.     New   York:   Mitchell  Kennerley.     1917. 

"Mark    Twain"     (Samuel    Langhorne    Clemens) 
(The  Middle  West). 

Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer  [1876].  Adven- 
tures of  Huckleberry  Finn  [1885].  Pudd'n- 
head  Wilson  [1894].  The  Writings  of  Mark 
Twain,  Author's  National  Edition.  New  York: 
Harper  &  Bros.     1915. 

Mark  Twain.  By  Archibald  Henderson. 
London:    Duckworth   &   Co.     1911.    My   Mark 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  323 

Twain;    reminiscences    and   criticisms.     By    W. 
D.  Howells.     New  York :  Harper  &  Bros.     1910. 

Note  also  the  specialized  treatments  of  par- 
ticular sections  of  North  America  by  innumer- 
able novelists  of  various  degrees  of  distinction, 
including  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe,  George  Wash- 
ington Cable,  Mary  Noailles  Murfee,  Hamlin 
Garland,  Alice  Brown,  Gertrude  Atherton,  Mary 
Austin,  Norman  Duncan,  Owen  Wister,  Jack 
London,  Rex  Beach,  Stewart  Edward  White, 
James  Lane  Allen,  William  Allen  White,  John 
Fox,  jr.,  and  Gilbert  Parker.  A  majority  of 
the  novels  of  William  Dean  Howells  show  him 
to  be  of  this  school  of  localists,  as  his  Criticism 
and  Fiction  shows  him  to  be  its  chief  sponsor. 
J.  M.  Barrie  (Scottish  Life  and  Charaeter). 

The     Little     Minister     [1891].     Sentimental 
Tommy    [1896].     Tommy    and    Grizel    [1900]. 
In     Works,     Author's     Edition.     New     York : 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1901-03.     11  vols. 
Rudyard  Kipling  (India). 

Kim  [1901].  New  York:  Doubleday,  Page 
&  Co. 

Rudyard   Kipling.     By    John    Palmer.     New 
York:      Henry     Holt     and     Company.     1915. 
(Writers  of  the  Day.) 
Joseph  Conrad  (Malayan  Archipelago). 

Almayer's  Folly  [1895].  An  Outcast  of  the 
Islands  [sequel,  1896].  Lord  Jim  [1900]. 
New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  (Deep 
Sea  Edition.) 

See,  for  an  accurate  and  nearly  complete  short 


324  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

bibliography  of  Conrad's  principal  writings  as 
published  in  England  and  America,  pp.  121-24 
of  Joseph  Conrad,  by  Hugh  Walpole  (New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Company,  1916. 
Writers  of  the  Day). 
See  XI.  below. 
Of  the  great  number  of  other  specialized  re- 
gional novelists,  the  following  may  be  men- 
tioned: Sabine  Baring-Gould  (Devon)  ;  "Kath- 
arine Tynan"  (Mrs.  Katharine  Tynan  Hinkson) 
and  Jane  Barlow  (Ireland) ;  "G.  A.  Birming- 
ham" (Ireland)  ;  William  Clark  Russell  and 
William  Wymark  Jacobs  (sailors  and  the  sea) ; 
Israel  Zangwill  (the  Ghetto)  ;  Thomas  Alexan- 
der Browne  (Australia);  Sir  Hugh  Clifford 
(Malay  Archipelago) ;  and  Archibald  Marshall 
(British  provincial  gentry).  The  most  impor- 
tant direct  influence  of  Hardy's  Wessex  Novels 
appears  in  the  works  of  Eden  Phillpotts  (Chil- 
dren of  the  Mist,  Sons  of  the  Morning,  The 
Harbor,  The  Thief  of  Virtue,  Widecombe  Fair, 
etc.)  and  in  those  of  John  Trevena  (see  espe- 
cially his  moorland  trilogy,  Furze,  Heather,  and 
Granite;  with  epilogue,  Gorse.  New  York: 
Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.  1912-).  See  also,  among 
very  recent  novels,  Sussex  Gorse,  by  Sheila 
Kaye-Smith.  (New  York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf. 
1916). 

XI.  A  supplementary  selection  of  striking  developments 
in  naturalism,  impressionism,  sestheticism,  the 
scientific  spirit,  Continental  influence,  etc., 
1880-1918. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  325 

William  Morris. 

The  Roots  of  the  Mountains  [1890].  Lon- 
don :  Longman.  The  Story  of  the  Glittering 
Plain  [1890].  London:  Longman.  The  Wood 
Beyond  the  World  [1895].  London:  Longman. 
The  Well  at  the  World's  End  [1896].  London: 
Longman.  The  Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles 
[1897].  London:  Longman.  The  Sundering 
Flood  [1898].     London:  Longman. 

(Essays  in  Gothic  and  mediaeval  romance; 
prose  poems  characterized  by  sensuous  beauty 
of  style  and  substance.) 

"Fiona  Macleod"  (William  Sharp). 

Pharais:  a  Romance  of  the  Isles  [1894]. 
The  Mountain  Lovers  [1895].  Green  Fire 
[1890].  Silence  Farm  [1899;  published  under 
his  own  name].  In  Collected  Works.  London: 
Heinemann.     7  vols.     1911. 

(Fantasies  akin  to  those  of  Morris,  but  char- 
acterized also  by  a  unique  blend  of  Celtic  mys- 
ticism and  quite  modern  realism.) 

George  Moore. 

A  Modern  Lover  [1883].  London:  Walter 
Scott.  A  Mummer's  Wife  [1884].  New  York: 
Brentano's.  A  Drama  in  Muslin  [1888].  Lon- 
don: Vizetelly.  Out  of  print.  Esther  Waters 
[1894].  London:  Walter  Scott.  Evelyn 
Innes  [1898].  New  York:  Appleton.  Sister 
Teresa  [1901].    New  York:  Appleton. 

(A  development  of  naturalistic  realism  culmi- 
nating in  Esther  Waters,  and  tending  there- 
after to  become  aesthetic  and  debilitated.) 


326  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

An  interesting  essay  on  Moore  is  that  in  G.  K. 
Chesterton's  Heretics  (New  York:  Dodd,  Mead 
&  Co.  1905).  See  also  The  JEstheticism  of 
George  Moore  in  Stuart  P.  Sherman's  Main 
Tendencies  in  Contemporary  Literature  (New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co.  1917). 
Oscar  Wilde. 

The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray  [1891].  Lon- 
don: Ward  &  Locke.  Also  in  Works,  limited 
edition,  Methuen,  1907-9. 

(A  brilliant  expression  of  Wilde's  own  tragic 
perversity.) 
Theodore  Watts-Dunton. 

Aylwin  [189S;  written  about  1885].  New 
York :  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 

(The  expression  of  an  aesthete's  conception  of 
immortality,  and  a  notable  embodiment  of  the 
Late  Victorian  aesthetic  movement.) 
Mrs.  J.  Humphry  Ward. 

Robert  Elsmere  [1888].  New  York:  Mae- 
millan. 

(A  study  of  the  decay  of  orthodoxy  within 
the  Church.) 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

The  Merry  Men  [1887].  The  Strange  Case 
of  Dr.  Jehyll  and  Mr.  Hyde  [1886].  In  1  vol., 
New  York:  Scribner. 

(Two  remarkable  examples  of  expansion  of 
the  short-story  into  the  modern  novella.) 
Stephen  Crane. 

The   Bed   Badge   of   Courage    [1895].     New 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  327 

York:  Appleton.     New  edition,  with  Preface  by 
Arthur  Guy  Empey,  1917. 

(A  great  and  perfect  piece  of  realistic  im- 
pressionism, dealing  with  one  isolated  phase  of 
the  American  Civil  War.) 
William  Hurrell  Mallock. 

The  New  Republic:  Culture,  Faith,  and  Phi- 
losophy in  an  English  Country  House  [1877]. 
New  York:  Scribner.  The  New  Paul  and  Vir- 
ginia: Positivism  on  an  Island  [1878].  New 
York:  Scribner.  The  Individualist  [1899]. 
London  :  Chapman  &  Hall. 

(Shrewd  and  diverting  satires  on  contempo- 
rary movements  in  science,  politics,  philosophy, 
and  social  life.) 
Ambrose  Bierce. 

The  Monk  and  the  Hangman's  Daughter 
[1911;  written  about  1890].  New  York:  Neale 
Publishing  Co.     (Vol.  6  of  Collected  Works.) 

(A  romantic  fantasia  quite  unspoiled  by  its 
satiric  purpose.) 
"Mark  Twain"   (Samuel  Langhorne  Clemens). 

The  Mysterious  Stranger.  New  York:  Har- 
per &  Bros.     1916  [posthumous]. 

(Mark  Twain's  one  expression  in  fiction  of  the 
misanthropic  pessimism  which  appears  to  have 
been  his  life-long  philosophy.) 
Frank  Norris. 

McTeague:  a  Story  of  San  Francisco  [1899]. 
New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  The  Octo- 
pus: a  Story  of  California  [1901].  New  York: 
Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 


328  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(Pictures  of  economic  conditions  and  histories 
of  class   struggles;   among  the  first   American 
novels  to  show  the  transition  to  modern  natural- 
ism from  the  earlier  sentimentalism.) 
Olive  Schreiner. 

The  Story  of  an  African  Farm  [1883].  Bos- 
ton: Little,  Brown.  Trooper  Peter  Halket  of 
Mashonaland  [1897].     Boston:  Little,  Brown. 

(Powerful  economic  and  soeiologic  tracts  in 
the  form  of  fiction.) 
W.  H.  Hudson. 

The  Purple  Land  [1885].  New  York:  E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co.  Green  Mansions  [1904].  New 
York :  Alfred  A.  Knopf.  1916.  A  Crystal  Age 
[1887].    New  York:  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 

(Stories  that  combine  richness  of  imagina- 
tion with  a  delicate  precision  of  style  hardly 
seen  before  in  English.  A  Crystal  Age  is  a 
modern  variation  of  the  Utopian  romance;  The 
Purple  Land  and  Green  Mansions  are,  in  part, 
sumptuous  landscapes  of  South  America.) 
Leonard  Merrick. 

Cynthia  [1896],  London:  Chatto  &  Windus. 
The  Worldlings  [1900].  New  York:  Double- 
day,  Page  &  Co.  Conrad  in  Quest  of  his  Youth 
[1903].  New  York:  Mitchell  Kennerley.  The 
House  of  Lynch  [1907].  New  York:  McClure. 
The  Position  of  Peggy  Harper  [1911].  New 
York:  Mitchell  Kennerley. 

(An  artist's  stories  of  the  artistic  tempera- 
ment in  various  manifestations ;  delicately  ironic 
realism,  the  method  slight,  but  the  sense  prob- 
ing.) 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  329 

William  Somerset  Maugham. 

Liza  of  Lambeth  [1807].  London:  Fisher 
Unwin.  The  Hero  [1901].  London:  Hutchin- 
son. The  Merry-Go-R<ound  [1904].  London: 
Heinemann. 

(As      uncompromising      an      exhibition      of 
"murky"  realism  as  can  be  found  in  English. 
Liza  of  Lambeth  has  a  noticeable  resemblance 
to  Moore's  Esther  Waters.) 
Jack  London. 

The  Call  of  the  Wild  [1903].  New  York: 
Macmillan.  The  Sea-Wolf  [1904].  New  York: 
Macmillan. 

(Perhaps  the  best  American  examples  of  mod- 
ern impressionistic  realism  in  treatment  of  the 
primitive  straggle  for  survival.) 
Joseph  Conrad. 

The  Nigger  of  the  "Narcissus"  [1897].  New 
York:  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  (as  "Children  of  the 
Sea,"  without  the  original  preface) .  New  York : 
Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  (under  original  title, 
with  the  preface  restored).  1914.  Heart  of 
Darkness  [1902].  New  York:  Doubleday,  Page 
&  Co  (in  Youth).  Typhoon  [1903].  New 
York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 

( Supreme  examples  of  modern  unity  in  work- 
manship, secured  by  impressionistic  treatment 
in  works  of  length  approaching  that  of  the 
novel.) 

Nostromo:  a  Tale  of  the  Seaboard  [1904]. 
New  York:  Harper  &  Bros.  (A  tremendous 
pageant  of  material  interests,  epitomizing  mod- 


330  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


ern  life  in  a  romantic  story  of  heroic  dimen- 
sions, set  in  a  South  American  republic.) 

Under  Western  Eyes  [1911].  New  York: 
Harper  &  Bros.  The  Secret  Agent  [1907]. 
New  York:  Harper  &  Bros.  (Two  novels  of 
the  revolutionary  and  anarchistic  spirit,  the 
first-named  written  in  the  spirit  of  Dostoevsky.) 

All  of  Conrad's  novels  and  tales  are  pub- 
lished in  a  uniform  edition  by  Doubleday,  Page 
&  Co.     (New  York.) 

See  Joseph  Conrad,  by  Hugh  Walpole  (New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co.  Writers  of  the 
Day).  There  is  a  valuable  essay  on  Conrad  in 
A  Book  of  Prefaces,  by  H.  L.  Mencken  (New 
York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf.  1917).  Note  also 
A  Personal  Record,  by  Joseph  Conrad  (New 
York:  Harper  &  Bros.  1912),  and  the  Preface 
to  The  Nigger  of  the  "Narcissus."  See  C. 
under  X.  above. 

Herbert  George  Wells. 

Tono-Bungay  [1909].  New  York:  Duffield  & 
Co.  The  New  Machiavelli  [1910].  New  York: 
Duffield  &  Co. 

(Expressions,  the  one  in  terms  of  commerce 
and  science,  the  other  in  terms  of  political  life, 
of  a  typically  modern  conflict  between  the  will 
of  the  individual  and  the  will  of  society.) 

See  H.  G.  Wells,  by  J.  D.  Beresford  (New 
York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co.  1915.  Writers  of 
the  Day). 

See  also  VI.  above. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  331 

Hilaire  Belloc. 

Mr.  Clutterbuck's  Election  [1908].  London: 
Nash.  A  Change  in  the  Cabinet  [1909].  Lon- 
don: Methuen.  Pongo  and  the  Bull  [1910]. 
London :  Constable. 

(Deft  satires  of  political  and  social  tend- 
encies in  contemporary  life,  bj'  an  observer 
who  distrusts  both  the  democratic  tendency  as  it 
exists  and  the  conservatism  which  opposes  it.) 

The  Girondin  [1911].  London:  Nelson. 
(The  same  attitude  expressed  in  a  powerful  his- 
torical novel.) 

"Maarten  Maartens." 

God's  Fool:  a  Koopstad  Story  [1892].  New 
York:  Appleton. 

(An  odd  and  striking  study  of  abnormality, 
with  a  sociologic  and  humanitarian  bias.) 

Edith  Wharton. 

Ethan  Frome  [1911].  New  York:  Charles 
Scribner's  Sons.  Madame  de  Treymes  [1907]. 
New  York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 

(Two  noteworthy  American  employments  of 
the  novella  form  as  practised  by  Henry  James; 
cf.  his  Spoils  of  Poynton.) 

The  House  of  Mirth  [1905].  New  York: 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 

(A  longer  work  witb  the  same  unity  of  im- 
pression.) 

See,  for  The  Valley  of  Decision,  IX.  above. 

Edward  Frederick  Benson. 

Dodo:    a    Detail    of    To-Day    [1893].     New 


332  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

York:     Appleton.    Mammon     &     Go.     [1899]. 
New  York:     Appleton. 

(Satiric  descriptions  of  frothy  smart  society.) 

Limitations  [1896].  New  York:  Harper  & 
Bros.  The  Challoners  [1904],  London:  Heine- 
niann. 

(More   serious   accounts   of   the   creative   or 
poetic  temper  in  its  clash  with  the  static  ele- 
ments of  society.) 
Enoch  Arnold  Bennett. 

The  Old  Wives'  Tale  [1908].  New  York: 
Doran.  New  edition  with  Preface  by  author, 
19.11.  Clayhanger  [1910].  New  York:  E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co. 

(Minute  and  exhaustive  realism  applied  to 
industrial  life  in  the  north  of  England,  in  a 
successful  effort  to  prove  that  nothing  is  com- 
monplace. The  first-named  is  the  one  great 
piece  of  recent  realism  in  English  which  suc- 
cessfully combines  the  Early  Victorian  large- 
ness with  Gallic  nicety  of  design  and  finish.) 

See  Arnold  Bennett,  by  F.  J.  Harvey  Darton. 
New  York :  Henry  Holt  and  Co.    1916. 
Robert  Hugh  Benson. 

The  Sentimentalists  [1906].  New  York: 
Benziger.  The  Necromancers  [1909].  St. 
Louis:  Herder.  A  Winnowing  [1910].  St. 
Louis:  Herder. 

(Three  of  several  novels  in  which  the  author 
attempts  to  apply  Roman  Catholicism  as  a 
solvent  to  a  succession  of  intricate  individual 
problems  of  conduct  and  thought.) 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  333 

John  Galsworthy. 

The  Man  of  Property  [1906].  New  York: 
Putnam.  The  Country  House  [1907].  New 
York:  Putnam.  Fraternity  [1909].  New 
York:  Putnam.  The  Patrician  [1911].  New 
York:  Scribner. 

( Tragi-comedies  of  individual  and  class  limi- 
tations, written  with  an  unique  formal  exquis- 
iteness.  Note  especially  the  perfection  of  de- 
sign in  each  chapter  considered  as  a  separate 
unit.) 

John    Galsworthy.     By    Sheila    Kaye-Smith. 
New  York:  Henry  Holt  and  Co.     (Writers  of 
the  Day.) 
Ford  Madox  Hueffer. 

An  English  Girl  [1907].  London:  Methuen. 
Ladies  Whose  Bright  Eyes  [1911].  London: 
Constable. 

(Dexterous  satires  of  modern  materialism,  by 
an  author  to  whom  the  restraint  of  art  seems 
the  one  possible  guide  to  fine  living.) 
Max  Beerbohm. 

Zuleika  Dobson;  or,  an  Oxford  Love  Story 
[1911].     New  York:  Lane.     Also  No.  50  of  the 
Modern  Library,  with  introduction  by  Francis 
Hackett  (New  York:  Boni  &  Liveright). 
Morley  Roberts. 

In  Low  Belief  [1890].  New  York:  Appleton. 
A  Son  of  Empire  [1899].  Philadelphia:  J.  B. 
Lippincott  Co.  The  Colossus  [1899].  New 
York:  Harper  &  Bros.  Immortal  Youth 
[1902].    London:  Hutchinson. 


334  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(The  first-  and  last-named  are  novels  of  the 
artist;  the  others,  novels  of  empire  dealing  with 
elemental  forces  in  human  nature.  The  writer's 
works  are  fairly  well  represented  by  these  two 
groups. ) 
Theodore  Dreiser. 

Sister  Carrie  [1900].  New  York:  Double- 
day,  Page  &  Co.  [Suppressed.]  New  edition: 
Harper,  1912.  Jennie  Gerhardt  [1911].  New 
York:  Harper  &  Bros.  The  Titan  [1914]. 
New  York :  John  Lane  Company. 

(Embodiments  of  a  naturalism  akin  to  that  of 
Moore's  Esther  Waters.  For  two  opposed  esti- 
mates, see  Theodore  Dreiser  in  A  Book  of  Pref- 
aces, by  H.  L.  Mencken  (New  York:  Alfred  A. 
Knopf,  1917)  and  The  Naturalism  of  Theodore 
Dreiser  in  Main  Tendencies  in  Contemporary 
Literature,  by  Stuart  P.  Sherman  (New  York: 
Henry  Holt  and  Co.  1917.) 
Hugh  Walpole. 

The  Dark  Forest  [1916].     New  York:  Doran. 

(A  sombre  and  profoundly  imaginative  treat- 
ment  of   Russian    character   and   temperament 
interpreted  through  a  Galician  campaign  of  the 
Great  War.) 
James  Branch  Cabell. 

The  Soul  of  Melicent  [1913].  New  York: 
Stokes. 

(A  romance  made  of  the  authentic  essence  of 
Aucassin  and  Nicolette,  but  replacing  the  medi- 
aeval naivete  with  an  extremely  delicate  con- 
scious care,  and  illuminating  realities  of  life 
and  love  that  do  not  change.) 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  335 


The  Cords  of  Vanity  [1908].  Doubleday, 
Page  &  Co.  Out  of  print.  The  Rivet  in  Grand- 
father's Neck  [1915].  New  York:  McBride. 
The  Cream  of  the  Jest  [1917].  New  York: 
McBride. 

(Quizzical  but  searching  studies  of  the  same 
realities  in   their   relation   to   modern   environ- 
ment). 
Ethel  Sidgwick. 

The  Accolade  [1915].  Boston:  Small,  May- 
nard%  Hatchways  [1916].  Boston:  Small, 
Maynard. 

(Firm  and  delicate  high  comedy;  the  touch  of 
Jane  Austen  applied,  with  more  than  her  depth 
and  sincerity,  to  the  country  aristocracy  of  con- 
temporary England.) 
Frank  Swinnerton. 

Nocturne  [1918].     New  York:  Doran. 

(Except  for  one  minor  flaw,  this  is  a  con- 
summate example  of  the  novella  form  of  The 
Spoils  of  Poynton,  Ethan  Frome,  etc.  In  unity 
and  harmony,  restriction  of  the  number  of 
characters  and  scenes,  and  the  disinterestedness 
of  its  acceptance  of  life,  it  typifies  the  modern 
crystallization  of  a  new  form  of  fiction,  half- 
way between  the  novel  and  the  short-story,  and 
combining  the  formal  merits  of  both.) 
Joseph  Hergesheimer. 

The  Three  Black  Pennys  [1917].  Gold  and 
Iron  [three  stories;  1918].  Java  Head  [1919]. 
New  York :  Alfred  A.  Knopf. 

(Two  novels  and  a  volume  of  short  stories 


336  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

among  the  few  pieces  of  recent  American  or 
English  fiction  which,  in  both  thought  and  work- 
manship, challenge  judgment  by  French  stand- 
ards.) 


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